731–740 of 842 posts
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Do tell, when is the last time a sitting US president has murdered his political opponents?
I think most replying to this comment are too young to remember that the CIA made several unsuccessful attempts to kill Castro himself, and Muammar Gaddafi. And those where the unsuccessful attempts that we know.
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On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is. Of course it might be wise to try to analyze what genetic/family/social/economic/political factors shape people like Castro, Gaddafi, Franco etc. — but if you think you're dealing with people like you and me you fail to grasp the phenomenon. Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychop…
'it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is' Really have to question this reification of "evil" per se. Evil is most immediately a religious construct. Or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, it is "banal." When did calling people evil ever lead to more justice in the world? As if George W Bush having the courage to call Iran and Iraq and Libya the "Axis of Evil" led to the US promoting peace in those countries? N…
No dude, "evil" is a social and cultural construct. We are doing this as a species, as in relying on taboos and moral rules, in order to survive. It's why we don't fuck our relatives, kill our children or eat our dead. This inherited culture is how 7 billion of us live on this earth without killing each other. And we need it because frankly many of us are too stupid to be rational all the time.
As for calling "evil" when seeing it, this is basically about communicating to other human beings a danger sign that can be universally understood. Which is in itself an act that can be used for evil, like the US propaganda for entering Irak, but then again we are flawed creatures trying to live our lives.
What I'm trying to say here is that this isn't an argument that you can win. And I'm not even sure that being more rational would be good for us. Because IMO even perfectly rational people can be easily fooled into believing flawed statistics and logical fallacies and I don't even care what Fidel's dream was for Cuba because the end never justifies the means IMO.
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On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is. Of course it might be wise to try to analyze what genetic/family/social/economic/political factors shape people like Castro, Gaddafi, Franco etc. — but if you think you're dealing with people like you and me you fail to grasp the phenomenon. Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychop…
I'm actually a little terrified that this is not the first comment I have seen on HN today that is praising Castro. This is NOT ok, and I'm shocked that it's even a thought to entertain here on HN.
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Ok, ok. Especially for locking his people in a prison island - an act which can't remotely be defended as 'in the interest of the people or socialism' or any progressive cause ... Fidel - borderline evil. Somewhat nuanced. Definitely bad. Not as bad a Hitler. There you go.
>Fidel - borderline evil The point isn't to quibble about the label. It's to refrain from leaping straight to applying labels. The pleas you're seeing for a calmer and broader conversation are not attempts to exculpate Castro.
No - I'm objecting to this with this comment.
Moral relativism is a problem in our era.
Castro is Bad.
Period.
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Ok, ok. Especially for locking his people in a prison island - an act which can't remotely be defended as 'in the interest of the people or socialism' or any progressive cause ... Fidel - borderline evil. Somewhat nuanced. Definitely bad. Not as bad a Hitler. There you go.
For a second I though you where talking about the renditions to Guantanamo, but no, of course that is different.
This why they are treated as such.
Castro is also bad (label), which is why Cubans revile him.
He has certainly led one of the most exciting lives of our times... And despite his flaws (and/or crimes against humanity) I can't help but wonder how Cuba would have faired under different leadership. Looking at the next-island neighbors in Haiti, or any number of comparable African countries, it seems the Cubans got the better deal. Just one example: life expectancy is 15 years higher than Haiti, and actually even…
Today, most Cuban ex-pats around the world are celebrating his death. Liberal Arts students across the Western World are saddened. To me that's funny.
To me it's equally funny how it's ok to group one side into wimpy liberal arts students (you forgot their MacBooks and lattes!) and the others into ex-pats. These days it's like superhuman to be able to look at an issue from two sides.
And my comment is not trolling.
I was seeing all the news of Cubans around the world celebrating, and then reading some comments here, in the Guardian, in the Globe and Mail - and noting the differences.
It's shocking to see so many people support someone who was almost so cruel.
'Please help us, this man we escaped is a totalitarian'
'Oh, you just don't understand your experience, we agree with this ideology and anti-Americanism, so whatever happened to you - it couldn't have been that bad, let's not judge him'.
It's one of those things that really tells us a lot about people.
There's a lot of complaining about Castro here (and elsewhere) specifically because he was a communist. But if you think about it, the capitalist West has really dropped the ball on this. Most of these communist movements - in Vietnam, Cuba etc - were originally national liberation movements. And the reason why they appeared was because the respective countries were colonies, and their people were painfully (in many…
I'm talking about the Dominican Republic. US had ensured that it would not go communist or socialist by two direct successful military interventions. It had its own corrupt capitalist dictator, but from there gradually reformed into a free (albeit still corrupt) democracy. It is geographically very close, and has a similar population size. So it's interesting to compare and contrast metrics like GDP, life expectancy, literacy etc:
http://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/cuba.dominican-re...
This is propaganda, disgustingly incorrect propaganda, so far off base the only conceivable way you could have written it is to be maliciously lying.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13042153 and marked it off-topic.
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Ok, ok. Especially for locking his people in a prison island - an act which can't remotely be defended as 'in the interest of the people or socialism' or any progressive cause ... Fidel - borderline evil. Somewhat nuanced. Definitely bad. Not as bad a Hitler. There you go.
> locking his people in a prison island... Oh the irony. Gitmo is in Cuba too :)
Cuba is a land full of regular citizens.
See the difference?