Oh yeah, Windows, the only OS that becomes BETTER when stuffed under hypervisor.
All others implement host partitioning within OS kernel, so single scheduler and virtual memory can use shared resources better. Windows, of course, would rather replace those things with braindead hypervisor because its own resource management is not any better. Great job indeed.
Even though usually politicians love Microsoft and evil corporations in general, not all of them would choose praising Windows when it gets in the way of good old fear-mongering.
Do you really think that anyone who is against socialized medicine feels that way because they dont like poor people and they think they are better than them?
Of course. The rest of your response is merely a propaganda formula used to make this obvious idea look less disgusting.
Actually American military-industrial complex produced that. Contrary to the popular (in US) belief, post-WWII USSR was extremely isolationist, and was only interested in expansion and arms race as long as it perceived a threat. Take into account that from USSR perspective WWII was a Western power jumping to the East as a delayed result of a previous Western conflict (WWI) that it wanted no part of in the first place, and US initiating Cold War right after co-operation with USSR in WWII did not inspire any confidence, either.
As for actual and perceived threat, I am sure that when US will fall (politically or economically) others will "discover" that it was always more of a paper tiger than a real threat.
... so it will be able to show useful messages such as "O RLY?", "YA RLY!", full collection of lolcats, shock sites, giant emoticons and recordings of recent Fox News broadcasts for trolling purposes, photos of Iwo Jima flag and other similar images. To facilitate responses it should also include gang signs with translations, images of fast food and various versions of "Yankees, go home!" phrase, Fall of Saigon photo, multiplication table, and large amount of porn. This improved version of the device will be able to facilitate meaningful dialogue between American soldiers and foreign population, and also useful for communication between police and immigrant and/or poor communities in US.
But yeah, I also laugh when reading those comments saying that the "only" thing that can happen if a virus infects a Linux machine is that you could lose your home directory which contains all your data...
Your data is worthless. Everything on the computer is worthless compared to the ACCESS TO OTHER COMPUTERS with ability to impersonate you. I can back up, erase and restore my home directories all day, but $deity forbids, someone will be able to use my computer to impersonate me on the network at my work, modify my backups or interfere with my work when I handle other people's accounts.
That exemption applies to Novell (who is subject to Microsoft's terms) but not Microsoft (who dictates the terms of the patent agreement). Microsoft still conveys SUSE Linux (of whatever version that vouchers are applied to) and is a subject to its components' licenses.
Stop the hate and recognize this is a company that's trying to preserve its own self interest. That's it's job in a capitalist society.
At this point the only useful job it can do is to die. Everything else would hurt everyone else, so why should I care for the well-being of everyone's enemies?
US and Nato footage from UAVs, satellites and recon aircraft has proven instrumental in locating mass graves of civilians murdered in ethnic cleansing operations by Bosnian Serb and Croat militias and that would otherwise probably never have been found. In some cases the perpetrators of the atrocities in question were even caught on film while doing the deed. Satellite footage can also serve to confirm the reports of refugees as to when a settlement was razed and if the footage is good enough the type of vehicles involved and any registration marks they carried can identify the party guilty of the atrocity and even individual military units involved.
And yet the same kind of satellite images were presented as "mass graves" in Kosovo, and then found to be something completely different. Not to mention some blurry photos "interpreted" by Powell in front of UN as some kind of mobile WMD factories in Iraq.
The Serbs for one got such a shock when they found out how these graves were being located by UN investigators that they started digging up the corpses of the people they had ethnically cleansed and tried to dispose of them by burning them.
Another fine propaganda technique backfires. "Ethnic cleansing" is a term that was made so it sounds like "genocide" and "mass murder" but can be used to describe anything that makes people of "undesirable" origin leave the area, discriminate against them blocking their access to privileged parts of society, etc. So burying "ethnically cleansed" people would be a pretty difficult thing, however it sounds great in political speeches and propaganda pieces presented as news to claim that widespread racism, discrimination and other kinds of assholeness, things that are pretty common around the world, are "ethnic cleansing".
We don't seem to be able to agree anywhere so I am going to stop posting on all the threads where we are still arguing. Just to let you know.
It means, you have failed to provide any supporting evidence or reasoning for your claims, and merely "debated" by expressing your beliefs expecting me to accept them on the virtue of their popularity among Americans. In other words, I have demonstrated that you (and many other Americans) are out of touch with reality. This brings us back to the original topic of this thread, what in more polite terms means that you should not argue about things if you could not be bothered to find and analyze the relevant facts.
The American government does not actively attempt to alter everyone's beliefs through control of the media or through control of textbooks.
How do you know that? And if it was the case, why American media stands out so much in its "opinions" that are closely aligned to the government's policy while media of the rest of the world seems to give drastically different picture?
Are Americans mentally different from the rest of mankind, so American TV and newspapers say the same as American politicians because their way of thinking different from the rest of people (and then it is inferior because Americans constantly are led to believe in things that are not true)? Or are Americans so loyal to their government that they and their media follow government officials' words even when the rest of the world clearly sees that those words are inconsistent with easily observable facts? But wouldn't it be strange that people who just happened to live within the borders of US have brains incompatible with people who live outside of those borders?
The only other possibility is that US media indeed is loyal to US government, either directly or through alliance with big businesses.
OK, but this does not justify the murder of thousands of civilians.
Military only fought against armed insurgents. It may be argued that their actions were "justified", but certainly they weren't "civilians" at the time when Soviet military intervened. You would have some kind of point if military jumped in to suppress peaceful protests or small-scale fighting, and provoked a large number of formerly nonviolent people to take weapons and fight back, however that was not the case, it was wide-scale fighting already.
Also, when did the US "roll in" to another nation (aside from Iraq) without blinking an eye and murder thousands of civilians
Pretty much every US intervention in Latin America.
to inspire fear?
More like, to overthrow a government or to destroy a political movement.
As for Kosovo, NATO decided that the repeated human rights violations by people such as Ratko Mladi and Slobodan Milosevi were too much and sent in peacekeeping troops to avoid a total civil war in the breaking-up Yugoslavia. I will not argue whether or not this was right, but again, the United States and NATO did not enter and kill thousands of civilians to inspire terror and repress the people of Yugoslavia.
As for Kosovo, it was a mini-Iraq -- complete with "opposition" (aka violent, mostly muslim Albanian separatists -- ok, that was even more stupid than Iraq) crying for American support, fake reports of mass graves based on blurry satellite photos of benign objects, oblique phrases such as "ethinc cleansing" that sound like "genocide" yet ended up meaning "discrimination that makes the people of oppressed ethnicity want to get out", attacks on Serbia just "because we hate them", kangaroo court for the now-dead former leader of the government, and all parties of the original conflict except US ending up worse than at the beginning of intervention. The only thing that is missing is wide scale of the conflict and thousands of American losses, and this is why it was not touted as a horrible failure in US.
Got you! The courts had very little if anything to do with McCarthyism, or at least with Senator McCarthy himself.
No one can possibly care about McCarthy himself -- what important was the policy and ideology. That was blindly supported by media, and the only reason why it was possible to stop that was because Supreme Court, a part of the government, did not want to co-operate. Once Supreme Court made it safe to attack McCarthyism, of course, forces within and outside the government suddenly started to oppose it.
Second, with respect to government and corporations. Again we believe in fundamentally different points of view. You are convinced the corporations are the government's lapdogs and I am convinced to the contrary.
One can just as well argue that both government and media are lapdogs of powerful businesses. It probably would be more precise to describe US media, government and businesses as parts of the single political force with only minor differences and weak conflicts between factions (parties, media outlets with supposedly conservative or liberal bias, etc.) Not really different from Communist Party in USSR, when party factions and officials in charge of various organizations could have various (sometimes bloody) conflicts between themselves, yet all of them supported the same core ideology and social system. In either case people without immense power or wealth are incapable of affecting the process in any way, they merely can attach themselves to the "winning" team and feel important, not unlike sports fans who are not capable of playing the sport itself yet see themselves as somehow important part of their team's success.
Especially since none of this discussion has to do with news reporting in Russia, I suggest we leave these topics off and go our own separate ways, believing our own separate beliefs.
But you have not provided a single instance of government control over media. It just doesn't happen. And you don't seem to be able to respond to the fact that the USSR did use massive amounts of propaganda.
That's a great example of a fnord if you can't notice them. Whenever I compare US and any foreign media, especially anything non-Western, it becomes pretty clear how much US media repeats US government's propaganda formulas. And when I don't, I am still sickened by the amount of illogical, sensationalist pandering to whatever is the currently most convenient to the government.
You missed the point. If you had strung the next sentence in, you would realize that all I was saying was that the reason troops were stationed around the world was to halt Soviet expansion. That was the reason, whether or not it was correct.
It was not the reason. A more realistic description can be found here and here. It would be extremely foolish for US military and political analysts, if they did honest job, to become mistaken about USSR intentions after WWII unless they all suffered from severe paranoia.
Now as for documents, I can produce one document and at least one other example. The document: the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, signed days before Germany invaded Poland. The agreement divided up Poland into a Soviet and a Nazi region.
USSR had no other choice -- at that time Germany literally 0wned Europe, and whatever land Stalin would not claim, would just go to Hitler in whatever version of the pact. Not signing the pact was not seen as an option because Stalin believed (more for ideological than practical reasons) that Hitler was not interested with a war against USSR, and was more afraid of USSR attacking Germany, thus signing the pact would protect USSR from Germany's "preemptive" strike. For USSR the pact was defensive, even if ill-advised. Poland and Baltic stated by that time were already doomed, and one can argue that if Nazi Germany managed to establish a stable empire within Europe, for any Eastern European country it would be much safer to be a USSR member rather than being ruled by Germans who literally treated population of those countries as subhumans according to their ideology, even before Holocaust.
region. As for the other example, Stalin made it clear in the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences that he wanted a "buffer zone" (i.e. that he wanted Eastern Europe) to slow further German attacks (the reason is irrelevant, he still was expanding). The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed by the USSR, so that counts, and Stalin spoke at both Yalta and Potsdam, so that counts also.
An important property of any buffer is its stability. USSR wanted (and got) a stable zone of influence controlled by governments allied with USSR, not some kind of forefront of continuing expansion. Apparently at the time US and Britain accepted it as reasonable.
Generally, given a lack of evidence to the contrary, one accepts a statement as fact. It was not until the media (yes the media, traveling with the soldiers in Iraq) reported that no WMDs had been found that we grew skeptical. After all, we are generally conditioned to trust our leaders (this is true of almost any society and the media has nothing to do with it).
It was from the very beginning known that there were no WMD. The only possible way for the public to believe in such a nonsense from the government is total suppression of all rational thought because it was already known that Blix inspection found nothing, and all information about supposed weapon programs came from people interested in invasion. It was also well known that government of Iraq had no ties with international terrorists, especially ones interested in attacks on U
Even if this were the actual figure, the US' maximum role was the installation of a (brutal) military dictator (no better than Allende).
Again, the claim that Allende was "brutal" is supported by nothing but American propaganda, and is based entirely on his political affiliation. He was the first Communist gained power in a non-Communist state through elections, and the only thing US politicians cared for was to reverse this, lest others would follow this example if it was successful. If he was "brutal", US would just have another state to point finger at and tell everyone how bad Communists are. Central and South America was at the time chock-full of various dictatorships of various degrees of brutality, and US didn't care about them unless Communists or Socialists were involved.
As for Hungary, it was a violent overthrow of its former government, US and its allies never blink before rolling into any country formerly allied with them or under their influence when such a thing happens, and even UN takes a side of established government against insurgents every time when it does any "peacekeeping". Worse yet, Kosovo war, where US and NATO fought on the side of the violent anti-government separatists (!) caused similar number of deaths in supposedly more peaceful and civilized time.
Lasted all of three years. Plus, it did not involve a secret police and in fact, attacked the FBI more than the FBI attacked it or any other citizen. You over exaggerate McCarthy,
More like it lasted a decade. But guess what? Stalin's repressions also were mostly confined to 30's. Their ideological support was absolutely identical to McCarthyism.
who, interestingly enough, was downed by the media. No, not the state-run media (which does not exist), but the independent media which simply attended most of the hearings and got some good interviews.
Courts (a government institution) brought down McCarthyism, not the media, and media organizations by themselves blindly followed McCarthyism policies against their own employees until courts told them to stop. Again, media merely followed politicians' will -- when McCarthy became a liability he was abandoned, and media merely served as an executioner.
Let's just say that I am not "very, very rich" (just an average citizen) but I enjoy many more freedoms than any Russian--or Belorussian--under the USSR's domination.
No. You are merely conditioned to never want anything that is beyond the very narrow scope of "freedoms" that government and businesses see as useful for them.
I can speak out against the government in public, in writing or orally, I can protest in the streets, I can practice a religion of my choice (this could have also been allowed in the USSR--I don't know),
This is a single form of "freedom" -- freedom of speech. Communists were paranoid about public speech because they have seen how much it can change in the society -- after all, they themselves remembered how it brought down Czarism. In US the public speech historically was extremely weak, so diluted and so easy to drown in big-business-supported media that it was absolutely clear that no popular movement can be created that way. Free speech never was a threat for society. The single example of successful anti-government movement in US -- Civil Rights movement -- had to first use methods blatantly outside the allowed "freedoms" such as civil disobedience and violence before its "legal" forms of protest became effective.
US has freedom of speech only because political speech in US is ineffective, and USSR had severe restrictions on freedom of speech because Communists believed ordinary people's speech to be effective. This is the only reason for that, and freedom of speech is THE ONLY real example of Communists severely restricting someone's freedoms. Everything that they did wrong in post-WWII time stems from this, and only this mistake.
Considering that most of population is not even capable of producing any meaningless anti-government speech, neither in US, nor in USSR it mattered for the overwhelming majority of population. Now in US still no one cares until a dominant media figure or powerful politician says something, and in modern Russia political speech is treated as untrustworthy bullshit. Political speech is still rendered ineffective in both those countries, just by different methods, however Russians are more cynical about it now.
I can publish anything I choose (with certain, very small restrictions [i.e. I cannot advocate the violent overthrow of the US government, however I can advocate a peaceful change in government]).
You can't publish anything unless a publishing company will agree to do so. And unless you can find a publisher who will believe that his company will make money and not get into any trouble for publishing you, your options are limited to a vanity release of your book that no one will ever read. The situation was even worse before the emergence of TV, when large number of people actually read something printed -- now no one would care about your idea unless it's constantly mentioned on TV, and TV is controlled by a handful of massive corporations, completely loyal t
Also you can look at the example of Yugoslavia -- a state in Europe that was run by a local version of Communists that had no problems coexisting with USSR while remaining politically hostile toward it. What is most ironic, now countries of former Yugoslavia are the most messed up and most intervened (by US and NATO no less) places in the whole Europe.
Well now we know why your point of view was different than all of ours. In the 1950s and 1960s, why were there so many small, tense incidents such as the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Berlin Airlift?
Because Khruschev learned about US missiles placed in Turkey, even closer to USSR than Cuba is to US. After the crisis missiles in Turkey were removed without much of a publicity.
Now you brought up an interesting point with propaganda. It's surprising that you would accuse the United States of using propaganda and having "propaganda workers" when it is undisputed that the Soviet Union used massive amounts of propaganda and Russia today does as well with almost all of the media being state-run. In the United States, the government does not own the media or influence it much; instead the media puts its own spin on the facts. And intelligent people get information from multiple news sources to gets the facts straight.
Government doesn't have to own press to control it -- it can just restrict the access to government officials, "over-regulate" the undesirable media outlets, allow monopolization of media by government-friendly outlets.
Now I also happen to know a lot about history, especially the American perspective (since that's what I learned in school [for better or for worse]) and I can tell you right off the bat that the reason US troops were stationed all around the world, especially in Germany, was to halt any Soviet expansion (which the Soviets did indeed try in 1948-1949) of communism and dictatorship.
I challenge you to find a single WWII or post-WWII document of Soviet origin that would prove that USSR had this kind of strategy. This is entirely an invention of US propaganda, designed to justify NATO and post-WWII growth of military-industrial complex within US.
Whether or not this reason ultimately played out is a different story. But that was why US troops were prominently stationed internationally. By the way, the US government did a poor job of convincing the American people that there were WMD in Iraq--many people severely doubted the accusation several days after the Iraq invasion.
It did a great job when it mattered -- before the decision about starting the war was made. Once the war is going on, there was no turning back, or at least that became the tune of propaganda when initial claims of the threat were thoroughly discredited -- and by everyone but the American media that would be in the best position to report it first.
Plus, if you cared to notice, Bush's approval rating has gone down over 60% since 9/11, so your propaganda comment is even more worthless.
Timing is important. Now, when Republicans managed to discredit themselves at the extent that they have to cede control for the next congress and presidential terms to Democrats, yet can't be touched until Bush's term expires, they allowed the press to bark at them to keep the impression of "impartial" press. Over-emphasizing the importance of fall from grace if the few Republican officials and scapegoating them for massive government corruption and lawlessness is more important than justifying the war or trying to raise the popularity of lame duck yet still untouchable president, so press is still performing its role of the government's lapdog when it comes to forming the popular opinions.
Long-term anti-USSR/anti-Russian hatemongering is another thing -- this started right after WWII, and is not going to stop any soon, so I find it appropriate for Russia to start treating it for what it is -- a hostile propaganda effort that should be effectively countered.
No because the American actions in Latin America were not complete massacres of thousands of people as the brutal crushing of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968.
The number of killed in Czechoslovakia was 72 people. In Hungary Soviet military fought against armed insurgents (some from the military), not the government or civilian population, and most of the killing and imprisonment in the aftermath of it was done by Hungarian government itself. All those interventions pale compared to the US-sponsored Chile coup alone.
Well, the FBI and the CIA did not terrorize US citizens. What you believe is Soviet propaganda. None of the First World nations had secret police forces as all of the Soviet bloc did. Where is your evidence to prove the monumental accusation you made?
McCarthyism, anyone?
You seem to blur the difference between propaganda and reality. In reality, you are spewing pro-Soviet propaganda (whether or not by choice). Maybe you did not experience it, but in the West, freedom of speech, religion, the press, etc. were respected. No ifs ands or buts. And don't disagree--you don't have experience to back yourself up.
I am "spewing" my personal experience. Both in USSR and in US, where I live now. US is "more free" only if you are very, very rich, however the number of those "free" people in US is so small, they could just as well not exist -- and obviously those people don't have to be loyal to the government -- they choose whom to push into power, so government is loyal to them. And unless you are a part of this elite, you are "free" only as long as you are harmless or don't step on any toes -- and if you do, laws quickly redefine "freedom" to exclude whatever you are doing. In everyday life average American is much more helpless against businesses and politicians than an average Russian was in 80's -- the only difference is that Americans are constantly told that each of them can become rich and taste the "freedom" that is waiting for him -- what really meant "power". In reality all that "freedom" is already divided between a fraction of a percentage of population, and no one who would ever bother reading this text can have a slightest chance to join them. It's order of magnitude worse than USSR -- there just as few people had power, but they didn't also had to hoard all wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Microsoft even acknowledge a local privilege escalation (nearly 100% of what counts for vulnerabilities in all other OSes) as a vulnerability?
Oh yeah, Windows, the only OS that becomes BETTER when stuffed under hypervisor.
All others implement host partitioning within OS kernel, so single scheduler and virtual memory can use shared resources better. Windows, of course, would rather replace those things with braindead hypervisor because its own resource management is not any better. Great job indeed.
Even though usually politicians love Microsoft and evil corporations in general, not all of them would choose praising Windows when it gets in the way of good old fear-mongering.
Of course. The rest of your response is merely a propaganda formula used to make this obvious idea look less disgusting.
Actually American military-industrial complex produced that. Contrary to the popular (in US) belief, post-WWII USSR was extremely isolationist, and was only interested in expansion and arms race as long as it perceived a threat. Take into account that from USSR perspective WWII was a Western power jumping to the East as a delayed result of a previous Western conflict (WWI) that it wanted no part of in the first place, and US initiating Cold War right after co-operation with USSR in WWII did not inspire any confidence, either.
As for actual and perceived threat, I am sure that when US will fall (politically or economically) others will "discover" that it was always more of a paper tiger than a real threat.
... so it will be able to show useful messages such as "O RLY?", "YA RLY!", full collection of lolcats, shock sites, giant emoticons and recordings of recent Fox News broadcasts for trolling purposes, photos of Iwo Jima flag and other similar images. To facilitate responses it should also include gang signs with translations, images of fast food and various versions of "Yankees, go home!" phrase, Fall of Saigon photo, multiplication table, and large amount of porn. This improved version of the device will be able to facilitate meaningful dialogue between American soldiers and foreign population, and also useful for communication between police and immigrant and/or poor communities in US.
But yeah, I also laugh when reading those comments saying that the "only" thing that can happen if a virus infects a Linux machine is that you could lose your home directory which contains all your data...
Your data is worthless. Everything on the computer is worthless compared to the ACCESS TO OTHER COMPUTERS with ability to impersonate you. I can back up, erase and restore my home directories all day, but $deity forbids, someone will be able to use my computer to impersonate me on the network at my work, modify my backups or interfere with my work when I handle other people's accounts.
Not in US law. Issuing vouchers is a part of distribution.
That exemption applies to Novell (who is subject to Microsoft's terms) but not Microsoft (who dictates the terms of the patent agreement). Microsoft still conveys SUSE Linux (of whatever version that vouchers are applied to) and is a subject to its components' licenses.
At this point the only useful job it can do is to die. Everything else would hurt everyone else, so why should I care for the well-being of everyone's enemies?
With quality and longevity of modern construction in US this will not be a problem in 3-4 decades.
And yet the same kind of satellite images were presented as "mass graves" in Kosovo, and then found to be something completely different. Not to mention some blurry photos "interpreted" by Powell in front of UN as some kind of mobile WMD factories in Iraq.
Another fine propaganda technique backfires. "Ethnic cleansing" is a term that was made so it sounds like "genocide" and "mass murder" but can be used to describe anything that makes people of "undesirable" origin leave the area, discriminate against them blocking their access to privileged parts of society, etc. So burying "ethnically cleansed" people would be a pretty difficult thing, however it sounds great in political speeches and propaganda pieces presented as news to claim that widespread racism, discrimination and other kinds of assholeness, things that are pretty common around the world, are "ethnic cleansing".
My goal is not to convince stupid people but to expose their stupidity.
It means, you have failed to provide any supporting evidence or reasoning for your claims, and merely "debated" by expressing your beliefs expecting me to accept them on the virtue of their popularity among Americans. In other words, I have demonstrated that you (and many other Americans) are out of touch with reality. This brings us back to the original topic of this thread, what in more polite terms means that you should not argue about things if you could not be bothered to find and analyze the relevant facts.
How do you know that? And if it was the case, why American media stands out so much in its "opinions" that are closely aligned to the government's policy while media of the rest of the world seems to give drastically different picture?
Are Americans mentally different from the rest of mankind, so American TV and newspapers say the same as American politicians because their way of thinking different from the rest of people (and then it is inferior because Americans constantly are led to believe in things that are not true)? Or are Americans so loyal to their government that they and their media follow government officials' words even when the rest of the world clearly sees that those words are inconsistent with easily observable facts? But wouldn't it be strange that people who just happened to live within the borders of US have brains incompatible with people who live outside of those borders?
The only other possibility is that US media indeed is loyal to US government, either directly or through alliance with big businesses.
Military only fought against armed insurgents. It may be argued that their actions were "justified", but certainly they weren't "civilians" at the time when Soviet military intervened. You would have some kind of point if military jumped in to suppress peaceful protests or small-scale fighting, and provoked a large number of formerly nonviolent people to take weapons and fight back, however that was not the case, it was wide-scale fighting already.
Pretty much every US intervention in Latin America.
More like, to overthrow a government or to destroy a political movement.
As for Kosovo, it was a mini-Iraq -- complete with "opposition" (aka violent, mostly muslim Albanian separatists -- ok, that was even more stupid than Iraq) crying for American support, fake reports of mass graves based on blurry satellite photos of benign objects, oblique phrases such as "ethinc cleansing" that sound like "genocide" yet ended up meaning "discrimination that makes the people of oppressed ethnicity want to get out", attacks on Serbia just "because we hate them", kangaroo court for the now-dead former leader of the government, and all parties of the original conflict except US ending up worse than at the beginning of intervention. The only thing that is missing is wide scale of the conflict and thousands of American losses, and this is why it was not touted as a horrible failure in US.
No one can possibly care about McCarthy himself -- what important was the policy and ideology. That was blindly supported by media, and the only reason why it was possible to stop that was because Supreme Court, a part of the government, did not want to co-operate. Once Supreme Court made it safe to attack McCarthyism, of course, forces within and outside the government suddenly started to oppose it.
One can just as well argue that both government and media are lapdogs of powerful businesses. It probably would be more precise to describe US media, government and businesses as parts of the single political force with only minor differences and weak conflicts between factions (parties, media outlets with supposedly conservative or liberal bias, etc.) Not really different from Communist Party in USSR, when party factions and officials in charge of various organizations could have various (sometimes bloody) conflicts between themselves, yet all of them supported the same core ideology and social system. In either case people without immense power or wealth are incapable of affecting the process in any way, they merely can attach themselves to the "winning" team and feel important, not unlike sports fans who are not capable of playing the sport itself yet see themselves as somehow important part of their team's success.
Beliefs have to be silent in the face of facts.
Should be: "any anti-government speech that would not be seen as meaningless".
That's a great example of a fnord if you can't notice them. Whenever I compare US and any foreign media, especially anything non-Western, it becomes pretty clear how much US media repeats US government's propaganda formulas. And when I don't, I am still sickened by the amount of illogical, sensationalist pandering to whatever is the currently most convenient to the government.
It was not the reason. A more realistic description can be found here and here. It would be extremely foolish for US military and political analysts, if they did honest job, to become mistaken about USSR intentions after WWII unless they all suffered from severe paranoia.
USSR had no other choice -- at that time Germany literally 0wned Europe, and whatever land Stalin would not claim, would just go to Hitler in whatever version of the pact. Not signing the pact was not seen as an option because Stalin believed (more for ideological than practical reasons) that Hitler was not interested with a war against USSR, and was more afraid of USSR attacking Germany, thus signing the pact would protect USSR from Germany's "preemptive" strike. For USSR the pact was defensive, even if ill-advised. Poland and Baltic stated by that time were already doomed, and one can argue that if Nazi Germany managed to establish a stable empire within Europe, for any Eastern European country it would be much safer to be a USSR member rather than being ruled by Germans who literally treated population of those countries as subhumans according to their ideology, even before Holocaust.
An important property of any buffer is its stability. USSR wanted (and got) a stable zone of influence controlled by governments allied with USSR, not some kind of forefront of continuing expansion. Apparently at the time US and Britain accepted it as reasonable.
It was from the very beginning known that there were no WMD. The only possible way for the public to believe in such a nonsense from the government is total suppression of all rational thought because it was already known that Blix inspection found nothing, and all information about supposed weapon programs came from people interested in invasion. It was also well known that government of Iraq had no ties with international terrorists, especially ones interested in attacks on U
Again, the claim that Allende was "brutal" is supported by nothing but American propaganda, and is based entirely on his political affiliation. He was the first Communist gained power in a non-Communist state through elections, and the only thing US politicians cared for was to reverse this, lest others would follow this example if it was successful. If he was "brutal", US would just have another state to point finger at and tell everyone how bad Communists are. Central and South America was at the time chock-full of various dictatorships of various degrees of brutality, and US didn't care about them unless Communists or Socialists were involved.
As for Hungary, it was a violent overthrow of its former government, US and its allies never blink before rolling into any country formerly allied with them or under their influence when such a thing happens, and even UN takes a side of established government against insurgents every time when it does any "peacekeeping". Worse yet, Kosovo war, where US and NATO fought on the side of the violent anti-government separatists (!) caused similar number of deaths in supposedly more peaceful and civilized time.
More like it lasted a decade. But guess what? Stalin's repressions also were mostly confined to 30's. Their ideological support was absolutely identical to McCarthyism.
Courts (a government institution) brought down McCarthyism, not the media, and media organizations by themselves blindly followed McCarthyism policies against their own employees until courts told them to stop. Again, media merely followed politicians' will -- when McCarthy became a liability he was abandoned, and media merely served as an executioner.
No. You are merely conditioned to never want anything that is beyond the very narrow scope of "freedoms" that government and businesses see as useful for them.
This is a single form of "freedom" -- freedom of speech. Communists were paranoid about public speech because they have seen how much it can change in the society -- after all, they themselves remembered how it brought down Czarism. In US the public speech historically was extremely weak, so diluted and so easy to drown in big-business-supported media that it was absolutely clear that no popular movement can be created that way. Free speech never was a threat for society. The single example of successful anti-government movement in US -- Civil Rights movement -- had to first use methods blatantly outside the allowed "freedoms" such as civil disobedience and violence before its "legal" forms of protest became effective.
US has freedom of speech only because political speech in US is ineffective, and USSR had severe restrictions on freedom of speech because Communists believed ordinary people's speech to be effective. This is the only reason for that, and freedom of speech is THE ONLY real example of Communists severely restricting someone's freedoms. Everything that they did wrong in post-WWII time stems from this, and only this mistake.
Considering that most of population is not even capable of producing any meaningless anti-government speech, neither in US, nor in USSR it mattered for the overwhelming majority of population. Now in US still no one cares until a dominant media figure or powerful politician says something, and in modern Russia political speech is treated as untrustworthy bullshit. Political speech is still rendered ineffective in both those countries, just by different methods, however Russians are more cynical about it now.
You can't publish anything unless a publishing company will agree to do so. And unless you can find a publisher who will believe that his company will make money and not get into any trouble for publishing you, your options are limited to a vanity release of your book that no one will ever read. The situation was even worse before the emergence of TV, when large number of people actually read something printed -- now no one would care about your idea unless it's constantly mentioned on TV, and TV is controlled by a handful of massive corporations, completely loyal t
Also you can look at the example of Yugoslavia -- a state in Europe that was run by a local version of Communists that had no problems coexisting with USSR while remaining politically hostile toward it. What is most ironic, now countries of former Yugoslavia are the most messed up and most intervened (by US and NATO no less) places in the whole Europe.
Hungary was:
1. already ruled by Communists.
2. was in the middle of an armed coup, insurgency or whatever you call it.
Obviously you would notice that if you bothered to read my other responses in this thread.
Also even US propaganda never went as far as to compare the existence of USSR sphere of influence to a Holocausts -- congratulations, you outdid them.
Because Khruschev learned about US missiles placed in Turkey, even closer to USSR than Cuba is to US. After the crisis missiles in Turkey were removed without much of a publicity.
Government doesn't have to own press to control it -- it can just restrict the access to government officials, "over-regulate" the undesirable media outlets, allow monopolization of media by government-friendly outlets.
I challenge you to find a single WWII or post-WWII document of Soviet origin that would prove that USSR had this kind of strategy. This is entirely an invention of US propaganda, designed to justify NATO and post-WWII growth of military-industrial complex within US.
It did a great job when it mattered -- before the decision about starting the war was made. Once the war is going on, there was no turning back, or at least that became the tune of propaganda when initial claims of the threat were thoroughly discredited -- and by everyone but the American media that would be in the best position to report it first.
Timing is important. Now, when Republicans managed to discredit themselves at the extent that they have to cede control for the next congress and presidential terms to Democrats, yet can't be touched until Bush's term expires, they allowed the press to bark at them to keep the impression of "impartial" press. Over-emphasizing the importance of fall from grace if the few Republican officials and scapegoating them for massive government corruption and lawlessness is more important than justifying the war or trying to raise the popularity of lame duck yet still untouchable president, so press is still performing its role of the government's lapdog when it comes to forming the popular opinions.
Long-term anti-USSR/anti-Russian hatemongering is another thing -- this started right after WWII, and is not going to stop any soon, so I find it appropriate for Russia to start treating it for what it is -- a hostile propaganda effort that should be effectively countered.
The number of killed in Czechoslovakia was 72 people. In Hungary Soviet military fought against armed insurgents (some from the military), not the government or civilian population, and most of the killing and imprisonment in the aftermath of it was done by Hungarian government itself. All those interventions pale compared to the US-sponsored Chile coup alone.
McCarthyism, anyone?
I am "spewing" my personal experience. Both in USSR and in US, where I live now. US is "more free" only if you are very, very rich, however the number of those "free" people in US is so small, they could just as well not exist -- and obviously those people don't have to be loyal to the government -- they choose whom to push into power, so government is loyal to them. And unless you are a part of this elite, you are "free" only as long as you are harmless or don't step on any toes -- and if you do, laws quickly redefine "freedom" to exclude whatever you are doing. In everyday life average American is much more helpless against businesses and politicians than an average Russian was in 80's -- the only difference is that Americans are constantly told that each of them can become rich and taste the "freedom" that is waiting for him -- what really meant "power". In reality all that "freedom" is already divided between a fraction of a percentage of population, and no one who would ever bother reading this text can have a slightest chance to join them. It's order of magnitude worse than USSR -- there just as few people had power, but they didn't also had to hoard all wealth.