Widely regarded as the most powerful US vice president, in terms of operational authority and policymaking control. He may be one of the people most responsible for the expansion of executive branch authority in place now. Nobody is more responsible for the post 9/11 loss of civil liberties. In comparison most other VPs, including the current one, have been ceremonial. Cheney almost made Bush 2 ceremonial.
the lesson of Nixon's later years (and heavily alcoholism) and Reagan's dementia and "plausible deniability" is that the GOP needs a face, while the plutocrats run the show. Chaney got his start under Nixon and was a Big Dick under Reagan.
HW Bush was the exception, but he raised taxes and generally pissed everyone off.
W and Trump are a return to form. Vance (channeling Thiel) and Stephen Miller are running the actual show.
Gerry didn't invent gerrymandering. The practice predates his example, and he wasn't even the one who made it happen in his famous example. He merely signed the bill enacted by the legislature. All he did was happen to be associated with a prominent example that got a name that stuck.
It's not really something that can even be invented. Once you have elections in districts with boundaries that can be altered, it follows straightforwardly that people will try to alter those boundaries in ways that benefit them electorally.
There's apparently an old Japanese saying that goes "Asleep, one mat; awake, half a mat." It refers to the space on a mat that everyone, even the Emperor, occupies.
"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."
(Interestingly, some of the world's dictators do seem to have an interest in the current state of the art in prolonging life. For example Xi and Putin chatted about organ replacement https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko)
He had been one of the signatories of the "think-tank" Project for the New American Century's [1] founding statement of principles, alongside 24 others, including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
During the Clinton administration, the PNAC had lobbied for invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then Iran from two sides, to install puppet regimes and secure the oil supply.
When GWB took over, Cheney became vice president and the administration got filled with many other PNAC members.
... and the rest is history.
The PNAC's membership lists and manifestos were at the time publicly available on their web site, now on archive.org [2].
It repeatedly surprises me that so few people didn't and still don't know about the PNAC.
What's amazing is that these folks can straight-up publish what they plan to do, and then people still act surprised when they do it. It's so weird.
See also: Project 2025. Or various propaganda strategies that are proposed publicly, in specific detail, then used verbatim. They don't even have to hide it, and still get away with it. It's totally bizarre.
> What's amazing is that these folks can straight-up publish what they plan to do, and then people still act surprised when they do it. It's so weird.
It makes a little more sense if you figure that there's a sizable contingent of folks are actually supportive of these plans, but perhaps want to save face by downplaying them in the moment or acting surprised.
It's not because of lack of education, lack of engagement, or genuine surprise, it's motivated reasoning from a value system that is fundamentally different than yours or mine.
This group is basically just the Israel lobby, which thankfully many more Americans are becoming familiar with due to recent events. They were immensely powerful back then (Buchanan was sidelined for going against them), and they still are today.
I think the more interesting question is why isn’t it colloquial knowledge the Rumsfeld et al were basically in bed with a foreign country? It’s especially important today given how our current presidents are still unable to control Israel. Both Biden and Trump want a ceasefire, deescalation etc yet Netanyahu (who played a large part in the clean break report linked to in your Wikipedia link) constantly rebukes them. Either they’re ok with it in private or they don’t have power…both of which should be very concerning.
In February 2006, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney, during a quail hunting trip on a private ranch near Corpus Christi, Texas. Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun when Whittington stepped into the line of fire after retrieving a bird. The pellets struck Whittington’s face, neck, and upper torso.
Whittington was hospitalized and later recovered. The incident became a major news story, partly because the White House delayed releasing details for nearly a day, raising questions about transparency. Cheney later called the event “one of the worst days of my life” and publicly accepted responsibility.
The shooting has since become one of the most remembered and parodied moments of Cheney’s vice presidency.
What's missing from this story is that Dick Cheney had the man he shot do a press tour apologizing to Dick Cheney and his family for causing any duress.
>"Roses are red, violets are Blue, if I go to jail, you're gonna go too!" -Scooter Libby
>"Dear Dick: Remember when you shot me in the face? Well down here in Texas, when I go any place, they say 'There goes the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face!'" -Harry Whittington
Cold Opening: Dick Cheney briefs Condoleeza Rice - Saturday Night Live
>Rice: But they have information like the titles of the president's briefing on August 6.
>Cheney: No problem. What was that again?
>Rice: Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States.
>Cheney: Ok, THAT's bad. Uhh.
>Cheney: All right, let's practice. When they make you say that title, there's going to be an audible gasp in the room. So you've gotta cough, cover up the gasp. Ok, let's practice. [...]
> Theres a high level of dislike for him probably justly earned.
Pretty much. At the same time, he didn't blow it all up. Cheney sits in the same class as figures like Kissinger. You can view them as Machiavellian overlords doing terrible things in pursuit of their personal agendas, sure.
But those agendas turn out... maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight? I'm not saying the Iraq war wasn't a terrible mistake or that the end result of the fighting in Vietnam was worth the horrifying suffering of its people. But the post-war and post-cold-war USA hegemony was defined by a single nation with a strong executive able to wield these terrible powers to terrible effect, with really very little check on its external (or internal) actions.
And, again, they didn't blow it all up. And I think that counts for something. Especially in the current climate where we're looking at a much less temperate regime actively trying to blow it all up.
I guess I'm saying that I'd trust Cheney with the buttons and levers and know that my kids could fix what he broke. I'm not so confident now.
I think people disagree with you because you take the position that, because the worst that could happen (I'm assuming nuclear war or something else "unrecoverable"?), those people are not that bad. This is a bad faith argument, because the lower end of your badness scale is pretty much unrealistic. What has been unrecoverable in human history up to now? Does that mean that no person/ideology has been "terribly terrible"?
Your debating style in your thread is also very patronising, which doesn't help.
If you fail to see the perspective of all those killed, or of the whole of the Middle East region, but only choose to see it from the point of view of the US or humanity as a species, then of course you're right.
> you take the position that [...] those people are not that bad.
I genuinely can't see where you get this except by deliberately misconstruing. I'm saying that "bad" is a nuanced position, and that we (collectively, including all the oppressed groups you're imagining) got through the last century or so in a much better position than we might have had the leaders we picked (yes, including Cheney) been more reflective of the ones ruling the rest of the world.
> If you [...] see it from the point of view of [...] humanity as a species, then of course you're right.
Well... yeah? It sounds like you're admitting to some nuance, but want it not to reflect the world we actually live in? Well... it does.
Your argument seems to be that Cheney's culpability for hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, trillions of wasted dollars, and multiple regime changes in the Middle East were all kind of OK because they [checks notes] didn't end global US hegemony?
That's an incredibly Machiavellian take, on par with Alex Karp justifying the building of SkyNet/1984 because we can't lose our global leadership position.
The "checks notes" thing is a marker that you're about to argue with a straw man. Don't do that here, please.
The root cause of the terrible stuff you (and I) cite, is that the US has terrible power. Cheney used a little of that power to do terrible things, as did Kissinger. But notably neither attempted to create a circumstance where the ultimate authority over the use of that power rested anywhere other than with the American electorate. When it turned out that Americans wanted to do something different, they walked out the door and handed over the keys, peacefully and happily.
Things can go much, much worse. And in particular we're currently looking at a regime that seems decidedly unwilling to hand over the keys.
> The "checks notes" thing is a marker that you're about to argue with a straw man. Don't do that here, please.
It's a marker that your argument is so unbelievable, I had to go back and read it again to make sure I got it right.
> But notably neither attempted to create a circumstance where the ultimate authority over the use of that power rested anywhere other than with the American electorate.
Cheney famously lied to Congress and the American people about the pretext for the Iraq War. He is also most famous for unprecedented expansion of executive power. He launched multiple wars without Congressional approval, which is also unconstitutional.
> When it turned out that Americans wanted to do something different, they walked out the door and handed over the keys, peacefully and happily.
First of all, they stole the election from Gore. Gore was certainly partly to blame for folding so easily, but the GOP candidate's brother being the governor of Florida and manipulating the election is not a small factor in that "victory".
Second, "the next guy did something even more terrible" is not tantamount to "maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight," as you put it.
When the US hegemony and (likely) the free world fall, we won't be able to trace it to a single act. It will have happened because of many unforgivable acts, many of which were effected by the Bush administration (including stealing the election from Gore and their horrendous SCOTUS appointments).
Nope, I got it. You were arguing that (an attempt at) ending the US republic is objectively worse than abusing it to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, to the point that Cheney can be viewed in retrospect as not that bad in comparison.
If and when the current regime succeeds at ending the republic, I would be willing to entertain that debate, especially considering that good things never come from an unpopular coup. But at this point, based on actual results, there is no one so much worse than Cheney that we can become nostalgic for Cheney.
just so you know this means you are pro-Cheney. the untold human suffering caused by those wars was in service of the system you are glad he didn't "blow up"
When I was younger I used to make the mistake that others had the same bit of humanity as me even if it wasn't obvious, that it must of existed somewhere within them. Then I learnt to accept that some people just suck and there isn't anything you can do about it. The only thing you can do is distance yourself from them.
If you must reduce the argument so far, then sure.
Khan and Caesar brought peace to millions. Life is complicated. But some worlds are worse than others, and Dick Cheney's actions sit solidly in the middle of the pack. They're part of the universe of discourse and action that the rest of us can live with and recover from. Not all leaders fit that mold.
Not to nerd out too much, but this is HN so it's probably OK. The Pax Romana/Mongolica concepts have wide support in academia. Unified government under despotic colonial powers was indeed the source of the immense social progress, and we simply have to treat with that. In fact, the rapid expansion of cross-eurasian trade under Mongol rule is arguably the proximate cause of the European renaissance, concentrating wealth in Italian trade centers designed to exploit the availability of those goods.
Does that make them good people or me a Yuan dynasty apologist? No. But it makes the world complicated and not well suited to the kind of quips that you're flinging at Cheney.
Again, we could do a lot worse. We may already have.
so, the wikipedia articles you shared show that pax romana and pax mongolica fostered trade. is increased trade worth genocide and mass slavery? I would lean to no but actually, you're comparing apples and oranges. why are you doing that?
nice job slipping "social progress" into your argument. I wonder what your sources actually say?
> Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but as a rare situation which existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist
VP Cheney’s extremely troubling wars in the Middle East and civilian death counts of between 146,000 and >700,000 should be a permanent stain on his legacy.
We can be thankful he lived to see the Cheney family being evicted from the Republican party in humiliating style; in no small part because of how ruinous his policies were for the right wing's strategic position. An unfortunate trend in history is a lot of these sort of people never have to confront how disastrous their legacy was. If there was an expectation that they have to see consequences of their failures in their own lifetime maybe that'd spur some standards that more ephemeral concepts of legacy do not.
Do you actually not understand or is this a political quip? If you spend any time around normal Americans its really not surprising. Having thousands of soldiers stationed for a decade+ over seas in a war zone in a war of attrition with no real objective, is seen as very different than "bomb the commies bringing drugs into the country". US people are really anti war, very pro bombing communists, terrorists, and drug cartels. One puts American soldier's lives at risks, one doesn't. Go to your local working class dive bar and talk politics for an hour and it should clear up why this is a very popular move, but being in Afghanistan isn't.
Something being a party plank does not mean every member of other parties must oppose it.
That said, there is one party that is consistently hawk-ish and boasts about war spending. And there is another party which most often campaigns on reducing war spending.
> That said, there is one party that is consistently hawk-ish and boasts about war spending. And there is another party which most often campaigns on reducing war spending.
Maybe if you only look at the war on terror years, but look at WWI and WWII and most recently Ukraine. Both parties love Pentagon spending when it's _their_ war.
Democrats did not started nor caused war in Ukraine. They were not the ones invading or threatening to invade. There is in fact difference between helping a victim of invasion to self defend and being the attacker celebrating manly man invasions.
We're not talking about starting wars versus getting involved in existing conflicts, we're not even talking about right versus wrong, we're talking about Pentagon spending and who benefits. The U.S. giving Ukraine our older weapons stockpiles so we can create NEW stockpiles doesn't speak to who started what, but that Democrats were sure in favor of increased spending while Republicans weren't. The assertion was one party always wants more spending on "defense" while one party doesn't. It simply isn't true, both parties are happy to find justifications to increase the Pentagon's budget.
> "In our nation's 248 year-history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump
And yet, the same person has advocated and pushed for greater powers to the presidency increasing the risks of such individual threats.
It's no coincidence that in the list of countries in the last 50 years that drifted from democracies to authoritarianism the tier of those that succeeded (the likes of Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey) are ALL presidential republics.
Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, while not being shy of power hungry smart individuals? None of them is a presidential republic. The play in such countries is the party-state identification, where the party takes control of key institutions, press and in the right situation can also grab more. But it's never as simple or easy as in presidential republics.
In fact, I think that Sri Lanka is the last fully parliamentary democracy to shit into full authoritarianism, and that happened almost 50 years ago.
I can't but wonder whether US citizens realize that the constitution is dated, written for different times and with much less experience and lessons to learn from other democracies. It shows all the cracks of presidential democracies:
- constitutions where 2 or more branches of government can claim public mandate through elections (in US case president + congress) which unavoidably clash, for no greater good.
- hard to impeach/remove branch. Say what you want about many democracies in Europe for changing governments frequently, but you're always one single majority vote away from having to resign.
- cult of personality. Presidential republics, by electing an individual instead of a parliament/coalition are much more prone to personality cults.
US has all of those ingredients and Cheney made sure to make these problems worse.
The successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in twenty-first-century America.
…
Cheney understood the catastrophe of 9/11 as an opportunity to accomplish and cement long-standing objectives. In the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cheney’s Pentagon commissioned a study on the future course of American power from Paul Wolfowitz, an adviser who would later enjoy great influence in the Bush administration. The draft document prioritized the active prevention of a peer competitor to US power from emerging. The objective of US grand strategy would be to preserve military, economic and geopolitical preeminence indefinitely. As he would when he became vice president, Cheney relied on a corps of neoconservative intellectuals he cultivated to supply the pertinent rationales. For Cheney, the virtues of dominance were self-evident. After 9/11, they drove him to favor invading not only Afghanistan, but the unconnected country of Iraq, whose regime was an outlier in the world America bestrode. A document contained in an energy task force Cheney convened before 9/11, and that he went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret, detailed “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.“
…
In the months after 9/11, these Cheneyite lawyers, wielding their boss’ influence, created in the shadows an architecture of repression. Addington wrote a draft directive permitting the National Security Agency, in defiance of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, to establish a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American. Flanigan, aided by Yoo, wrote the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that made the world into a battlefield at the direction of the president. They further permitted, encouraged, and protected the CIA in launching a regimen of torture-as-geopolitical-revenge, masquerading as intelligence gathering, as well as a network of secret prisons to detain the agency’s alleged-terrorist captives indefinitely. They declared that battlefield captives could be held as “unlawful enemy combatants,” deserving none of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and corralled them, without charge, into the military base at Guantánamo Bay until an end of hostilities that might never arrive. With the exception of CIA torture and much of the wholesale domestic acquisition of Americans’ metadata, these authorities and practices, in one form or another, persist to this day.
Cheney did all of this because his deepest conviction was that the presidency was an elected monarchy. Misconstruing an argument of Alexander Hamilton’s from Federalist 70, Cheney pursued what became known as the Unitary Executive Theory. It was predicated on the idea of an unencumbered presidency empowered to control every aspect of the executive branch, regardless of any affected office or agency’s intended independence from political decisions. Cheney had understood the post-Watergate reforms from Nixon’s criminal presidency as a congressional usurpation, and he intended to roll them all back. Excluding Congress from wresting any transparency from his secret Energy Task Force was, to Cheney, part of the point. After 9/11, Yoo contended that during wartime – a circumstance conceivably permanent in a War on Terror – presidential authority is all but plenary. He likes his argument a lot less now that Trump uses it to murder fishermen in the Caribbean, but, like his Bush administration colleagues, takes no responsibility for authoring the authoritarian usurpations of power that he now bemoans.
I think he was a patriot. That’s what made him so dangerous. He believed he had the best interests of the nation at heart. He probably convinced himself that Iraq really did pose a threat.
I don't think he did it largely for personnel gain. I do think he personally gained but look at every political decision ever made. There are winners and losers. Almost none of them are 100% based on altruism. How does any Senator enter government with a net worth of a 100k and 5 years later is worth millions on a salary of 174k while supporting 2 households (DC and home state). All of them grift. All of them vote for things that end up killing or harming people. That is the nature of government and the nature of military super powers.
Don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting he was a good person just that he was a person.
> I do find it ironic, however, that someone as far right as him (and his extremest daughter) are still seen as DINOs by Trumpers.
IIRC, his _other_ daughter is gay, leading him to be noticeably silent during the period when passing anti-gay-marriage legislation was a core issue of the GOP, which explains a great deal of the RINO accusation (I assume you actually meant RINO, not DINO :) )
It’s natural for people to care more about things that directly affect them.
Castro was in a foreign country I’ve never been to, and did most of his stuff before I was even born. His death was largely a realization that somebody from the history books had still been alive.
Cheney, in contrast, fucked with my home while I was an adult. He and his cabal did massive damage to my country very recently. I’m not going to make travel arrangements to visit his grave so I can piss on it, but I am tempted to.
What exactly do you want to say in here? The Castro is called evil a lot in that discussion. Welch is criticized. People here right now seem to complain about Cheney.
Jack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love.
If you had to say something positive about him, it would be something like "well if he hadn't done it, someone else would have". That is not a high bar.
You can give him credit for showing us that the foundations of our approach is rotten.
He's a bit like Trump in that :-/
> Jack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love.
He may have eventually have 'found religion':
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[69]
However this was probably much later and when his image was less influential; his earlier career and fame probably really helped accelerate financialisation, and was probably never reset by his later opinions (partly because they may not have been as widely publicized).
Though on climate change:
> Welch identified politically as a Republican.[66] He stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis".[67] Yet he said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not ... because the world wants these products".[68]
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[69]
Rather odd to see this quote coming from Welch, the man who almost single-handedly destroyed the notion that corporations had a duty to employees, and society at large first, and shareholder value coming as a result of those.
His actions, and management style completely defined the era of corporate behaviour we live since the 1980s: the layoffs, the carelessness on axing whole departments of companies which underperformed for a couple of quarters, only looking through short-term financials, all the focus on quarterly reports and financialisation of the economy come from his "teachings".
It was very hard for me to believe he uttered these words, rot in hell, Jack.
Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.
Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.
actually I've been detecting a sharp increase in US rightwingness and nationalism comments on HN. I was wondering if it was just trolling or HN was now on some bot list or if there was a real change in sentiment in the US?
There is a real change in sentiment in the US. Note the last election results.
But also there has been an increasing amount of polarization to both the left and the right from the center. Likely in part due to social media filter bubbles.
I doubt there has been much change in numbers, those on the right are just willing to be a little more visible now. It helps that HN is for the most part an anon. site.
Current right wing propaganda utilizes a strategy of "flood the zone", based on the "Russian firehose" approach.
This means injecting all talking points all of the time, and disrupting any criticism anywhere.
LLMs make this easier and more effective, and HN is absolutely, 100% owned by bots. And in like a literal sense, given who YCombinator funds and is headed by.
couple of points.
1. I'm not a bot. I'm just politically right, we are around, we just hide because its still career suicide in tech. I know you don't see the right as human but most of us are people just like you, not LLMs
2. I just like to chat on HN, there is no right wing mass organized process for people to chat with others, or at least none that I am a part of. To think that everyone you disagree with must be a bot or part of a conspiracy is both dehumanizing and just... an odd way to see the world.
3. The OP I responded to specifically mentioned the difference responses to the deaths of well known people. Mentioning Castro and comparing to Cheney. That was the context of my response, not sure how this has now veered into organized conspiracy theories
IMO that is different than rank-and-file. My theory is that once you make a certain amount of money you run a high risk of becoming divorced from reality.
I think it's useful to separate "tech" from "the VC ecosystem" and "most of tech leadership", the former being a huge range of people, while the latter two being a small group comparatively.
Not to mention HN is yet another sub-section of the "tech" ecosystem with a small cross-section of VC and startups, although that was indeed the focus on the beginning, I think the scope of HN has grown quite a lot since its beginnings.
Most of tech leadership blows with the wind, they have no firm beliefs. Whatever drives shareholder value. See Zuck. Although I do agree those more to the right have been emboldened to speak up a little more. I think the vast majority of the rank and file including managers are still on the left
I think any article that espouses a political slant will have political comments which I welcome. I enjoy hearing from people with different leanings and discussing them. I just get frustrated when they are based on emotion and not reason
Widely regarded as the most powerful US vice president, in terms of operational authority and policymaking control. He may be one of the people most responsible for the expansion of executive branch authority in place now. Nobody is more responsible for the post 9/11 loss of civil liberties. In comparison most other VPs, including the current one, have been ceremonial. Cheney almost made Bush 2 ceremonial.
the lesson of Nixon's later years (and heavily alcoholism) and Reagan's dementia and "plausible deniability" is that the GOP needs a face, while the plutocrats run the show. Chaney got his start under Nixon and was a Big Dick under Reagan.
HW Bush was the exception, but he raised taxes and generally pissed everyone off.
W and Trump are a return to form. Vance (channeling Thiel) and Stephen Miller are running the actual show.
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seemed to be sullivan, nulland and blinken
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Gerry didn't invent gerrymandering. The practice predates his example, and he wasn't even the one who made it happen in his famous example. He merely signed the bill enacted by the legislature. All he did was happen to be associated with a prominent example that got a name that stuck.
It's not really something that can even be invented. Once you have elections in districts with boundaries that can be altered, it follows straightforwardly that people will try to alter those boundaries in ways that benefit them electorally.
Good old Dick. This article from The Economist, about Abu Graib and Cheney's way to make friend, is I think a fitting obituary: <|trigger warning alert|> https://www.economist.com/culture/2008/05/15/tortured-truth <|seriously, Dick?|>
Don't you find liberating that any human, no matter how powerful they may be, how good or bad they are, cannot escape from death?
Maybe it sounds a little dark or edgy, but this thought gives me peace. Imagine what an immortal tyrant could do to humanity...
Yet he was surrounded by his family by the very end. Pretty much died under his conditions, unlike all the other lives he affected
> Imagine what an immortal tyrant could do to humanity...
I'd imagine an immortal tyrant would do nothing to humanity since humanity would be insignificant to him.
There's apparently an old Japanese saying that goes "Asleep, one mat; awake, half a mat." It refers to the space on a mat that everyone, even the Emperor, occupies.
Until you learn it's not individuals, but groups of them with ideas that persist for multiple generations.
“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.”
Tomorrow is the 5th of November after all.
The great equalizer
Straight from The Great Dictator.
"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."
(Interestingly, some of the world's dictators do seem to have an interest in the current state of the art in prolonging life. For example Xi and Putin chatted about organ replacement https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko)
He had been one of the signatories of the "think-tank" Project for the New American Century's [1] founding statement of principles, alongside 24 others, including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
During the Clinton administration, the PNAC had lobbied for invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then Iran from two sides, to install puppet regimes and secure the oil supply.
When GWB took over, Cheney became vice president and the administration got filled with many other PNAC members.
... and the rest is history.
The PNAC's membership lists and manifestos were at the time publicly available on their web site, now on archive.org [2].
It repeatedly surprises me that so few people didn't and still don't know about the PNAC.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208013451/https://www.newam...
What's amazing is that these folks can straight-up publish what they plan to do, and then people still act surprised when they do it. It's so weird.
See also: Project 2025. Or various propaganda strategies that are proposed publicly, in specific detail, then used verbatim. They don't even have to hide it, and still get away with it. It's totally bizarre.
> What's amazing is that these folks can straight-up publish what they plan to do, and then people still act surprised when they do it. It's so weird.
It makes a little more sense if you figure that there's a sizable contingent of folks are actually supportive of these plans, but perhaps want to save face by downplaying them in the moment or acting surprised.
It's not because of lack of education, lack of engagement, or genuine surprise, it's motivated reasoning from a value system that is fundamentally different than yours or mine.
This group is basically just the Israel lobby, which thankfully many more Americans are becoming familiar with due to recent events. They were immensely powerful back then (Buchanan was sidelined for going against them), and they still are today.
I think the more interesting question is why isn’t it colloquial knowledge the Rumsfeld et al were basically in bed with a foreign country? It’s especially important today given how our current presidents are still unable to control Israel. Both Biden and Trump want a ceasefire, deescalation etc yet Netanyahu (who played a large part in the clean break report linked to in your Wikipedia link) constantly rebukes them. Either they’re ok with it in private or they don’t have power…both of which should be very concerning.
Israel and America allied for straightforward reasons during the Cold War. The theory that Israel 'controls' America is as stupid as it is popular.
Good riddance, burn in hell asshole.
In February 2006, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney, during a quail hunting trip on a private ranch near Corpus Christi, Texas. Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun when Whittington stepped into the line of fire after retrieving a bird. The pellets struck Whittington’s face, neck, and upper torso.
Whittington was hospitalized and later recovered. The incident became a major news story, partly because the White House delayed releasing details for nearly a day, raising questions about transparency. Cheney later called the event “one of the worst days of my life” and publicly accepted responsibility.
The shooting has since become one of the most remembered and parodied moments of Cheney’s vice presidency.
Harry Whittington Apologizes for Getting Shot in the Face by Dick Cheney.
Thats real power.
What's missing from this story is that Dick Cheney had the man he shot do a press tour apologizing to Dick Cheney and his family for causing any duress.
100yr from now shotgun buyers and sellers will still be cracking jokes about shooting lawyers.
I remember the “20 ways Dick Cheney can kill you” posters. Unbelievable energy.
Happy Valentine's Day from The Cheney Family - SNL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5dwsLWR7uY
>"Roses are red, violets are Blue, if I go to jail, you're gonna go too!" -Scooter Libby
>"Dear Dick: Remember when you shot me in the face? Well down here in Texas, when I go any place, they say 'There goes the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face!'" -Harry Whittington
Cold Opening: Dick Cheney briefs Condoleeza Rice - Saturday Night Live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKl4oAcWBp4
>Rice: Sir, with all due respect, I'm still not certain how to address some of these facts.
>Cheney: Two words: It's classified! Eh heh heh heh heh heh.
>Rice: But they have information like the titles of the president's briefing on August 6.
>Cheney: No problem. What was that again?
>Rice: Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States.
>Cheney: Ok, THAT's bad. Uhh.
>Cheney: All right, let's practice. When they make you say that title, there's going to be an audible gasp in the room. So you've gotta cough, cover up the gasp. Ok, let's practice. [...]
His company Halliburton was the supplier for all the Gulf Wars and the Vietnam war.
I suspect that they were not lobbying to end any of these wars and were profiting greatly off of soldiers deaths.
Theres a high level of dislike for him probably justly earned.
Halliburton gave Cheney $34mil when he left the company to go be Vice President
War is a Racket - Smedley Butler
> Theres a high level of dislike for him probably justly earned.
Pretty much. At the same time, he didn't blow it all up. Cheney sits in the same class as figures like Kissinger. You can view them as Machiavellian overlords doing terrible things in pursuit of their personal agendas, sure.
But those agendas turn out... maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight? I'm not saying the Iraq war wasn't a terrible mistake or that the end result of the fighting in Vietnam was worth the horrifying suffering of its people. But the post-war and post-cold-war USA hegemony was defined by a single nation with a strong executive able to wield these terrible powers to terrible effect, with really very little check on its external (or internal) actions.
And, again, they didn't blow it all up. And I think that counts for something. Especially in the current climate where we're looking at a much less temperate regime actively trying to blow it all up.
I guess I'm saying that I'd trust Cheney with the buttons and levers and know that my kids could fix what he broke. I'm not so confident now.
I think people disagree with you because you take the position that, because the worst that could happen (I'm assuming nuclear war or something else "unrecoverable"?), those people are not that bad. This is a bad faith argument, because the lower end of your badness scale is pretty much unrealistic. What has been unrecoverable in human history up to now? Does that mean that no person/ideology has been "terribly terrible"?
Your debating style in your thread is also very patronising, which doesn't help.
If you fail to see the perspective of all those killed, or of the whole of the Middle East region, but only choose to see it from the point of view of the US or humanity as a species, then of course you're right.
> you take the position that [...] those people are not that bad.
I genuinely can't see where you get this except by deliberately misconstruing. I'm saying that "bad" is a nuanced position, and that we (collectively, including all the oppressed groups you're imagining) got through the last century or so in a much better position than we might have had the leaders we picked (yes, including Cheney) been more reflective of the ones ruling the rest of the world.
> If you [...] see it from the point of view of [...] humanity as a species, then of course you're right.
Well... yeah? It sounds like you're admitting to some nuance, but want it not to reflect the world we actually live in? Well... it does.
Your argument seems to be that Cheney's culpability for hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, trillions of wasted dollars, and multiple regime changes in the Middle East were all kind of OK because they [checks notes] didn't end global US hegemony?
That's an incredibly Machiavellian take, on par with Alex Karp justifying the building of SkyNet/1984 because we can't lose our global leadership position.
The "checks notes" thing is a marker that you're about to argue with a straw man. Don't do that here, please.
The root cause of the terrible stuff you (and I) cite, is that the US has terrible power. Cheney used a little of that power to do terrible things, as did Kissinger. But notably neither attempted to create a circumstance where the ultimate authority over the use of that power rested anywhere other than with the American electorate. When it turned out that Americans wanted to do something different, they walked out the door and handed over the keys, peacefully and happily.
Things can go much, much worse. And in particular we're currently looking at a regime that seems decidedly unwilling to hand over the keys.
> The "checks notes" thing is a marker that you're about to argue with a straw man. Don't do that here, please.
It's a marker that your argument is so unbelievable, I had to go back and read it again to make sure I got it right.
> But notably neither attempted to create a circumstance where the ultimate authority over the use of that power rested anywhere other than with the American electorate.
Cheney famously lied to Congress and the American people about the pretext for the Iraq War. He is also most famous for unprecedented expansion of executive power. He launched multiple wars without Congressional approval, which is also unconstitutional.
> When it turned out that Americans wanted to do something different, they walked out the door and handed over the keys, peacefully and happily.
First of all, they stole the election from Gore. Gore was certainly partly to blame for folding so easily, but the GOP candidate's brother being the governor of Florida and manipulating the election is not a small factor in that "victory".
Second, "the next guy did something even more terrible" is not tantamount to "maybe not to be so terribly terrible in hindsight," as you put it.
When the US hegemony and (likely) the free world fall, we won't be able to trace it to a single act. It will have happened because of many unforgivable acts, many of which were effected by the Bush administration (including stealing the election from Gore and their horrendous SCOTUS appointments).
> your argument is so unbelievable, I had to go back and read it again to make sure I got it right.
You didn't. I had to repeat it.
Nope, I got it. You were arguing that (an attempt at) ending the US republic is objectively worse than abusing it to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, to the point that Cheney can be viewed in retrospect as not that bad in comparison.
If and when the current regime succeeds at ending the republic, I would be willing to entertain that debate, especially considering that good things never come from an unpopular coup. But at this point, based on actual results, there is no one so much worse than Cheney that we can become nostalgic for Cheney.
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just so you know this means you are pro-Cheney. the untold human suffering caused by those wars was in service of the system you are glad he didn't "blow up"
When I was younger I used to make the mistake that others had the same bit of humanity as me even if it wasn't obvious, that it must of existed somewhere within them. Then I learnt to accept that some people just suck and there isn't anything you can do about it. The only thing you can do is distance yourself from them.
If you must reduce the argument so far, then sure.
Khan and Caesar brought peace to millions. Life is complicated. But some worlds are worse than others, and Dick Cheney's actions sit solidly in the middle of the pack. They're part of the universe of discourse and action that the rest of us can live with and recover from. Not all leaders fit that mold.
"Just so you know", as it were.
> Khan and Caesar brought peace to millions
They make a desolation, and call it peace
Not to nerd out too much, but this is HN so it's probably OK. The Pax Romana/Mongolica concepts have wide support in academia. Unified government under despotic colonial powers was indeed the source of the immense social progress, and we simply have to treat with that. In fact, the rapid expansion of cross-eurasian trade under Mongol rule is arguably the proximate cause of the European renaissance, concentrating wealth in Italian trade centers designed to exploit the availability of those goods.
As always, wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica
Does that make them good people or me a Yuan dynasty apologist? No. But it makes the world complicated and not well suited to the kind of quips that you're flinging at Cheney.
Again, we could do a lot worse. We may already have.
so, the wikipedia articles you shared show that pax romana and pax mongolica fostered trade. is increased trade worth genocide and mass slavery? I would lean to no but actually, you're comparing apples and oranges. why are you doing that?
nice job slipping "social progress" into your argument. I wonder what your sources actually say?
> Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but as a rare situation which existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist
yay social progress!
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His daughter Liz is keeping the love for war going.
His daughter Liz left the MAGA Republican party long before it was obvious they'd return to power, and actively opposed them at great political cost.
It's strange to watch someone you'd otherwise be against with every fibre of your being, do something principled you agree with.
VP Cheney’s extremely troubling wars in the Middle East and civilian death counts of between 146,000 and >700,000 should be a permanent stain on his legacy.
His company Haliburton also was the supplier for the Vietnam war.
The quintessential example of the military industrial complex.
And a big piece of Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, for which they largely escaped criticism.
It just gets worse and worse
We can be thankful he lived to see the Cheney family being evicted from the Republican party in humiliating style; in no small part because of how ruinous his policies were for the right wing's strategic position. An unfortunate trend in history is a lot of these sort of people never have to confront how disastrous their legacy was. If there was an expectation that they have to see consequences of their failures in their own lifetime maybe that'd spur some standards that more ephemeral concepts of legacy do not.
It feels like more of an honor to be kicked out of the current Republican Party, an honor Dick Cheney did not deserve.
I don't think his legacy was the reason him or his daughter were kicked out of the Republican party.
It was solely due to speaking out against Trump.
A not insignificant reason for the rise of Trump were the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Cheney is directly responsible for.
Odd that so few folks supposedly opposed to those wars appear to be speaking out against war with Venezuela.
> Odd that so few folks supposedly opposed to those wars appear to be speaking out against war with Venezuela.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Venezuela and Nigeria have vast oil and rare earth deposits. Eh also Greenland. Hmm, there might be a pattern :)
Do you actually not understand or is this a political quip? If you spend any time around normal Americans its really not surprising. Having thousands of soldiers stationed for a decade+ over seas in a war zone in a war of attrition with no real objective, is seen as very different than "bomb the commies bringing drugs into the country". US people are really anti war, very pro bombing communists, terrorists, and drug cartels. One puts American soldier's lives at risks, one doesn't. Go to your local working class dive bar and talk politics for an hour and it should clear up why this is a very popular move, but being in Afghanistan isn't.
War profiteering seems like a plank of the Republican party both pre-Trump and within the Trump era.
You're positive there are zero democrats with no financial stake in defense contractors?
To me it seems an issue of individuals, rather than "parties".
Something being a party plank does not mean every member of other parties must oppose it.
That said, there is one party that is consistently hawk-ish and boasts about war spending. And there is another party which most often campaigns on reducing war spending.
> That said, there is one party that is consistently hawk-ish and boasts about war spending. And there is another party which most often campaigns on reducing war spending.
Maybe if you only look at the war on terror years, but look at WWI and WWII and most recently Ukraine. Both parties love Pentagon spending when it's _their_ war.
Democrats did not started nor caused war in Ukraine. They were not the ones invading or threatening to invade. There is in fact difference between helping a victim of invasion to self defend and being the attacker celebrating manly man invasions.
We're not talking about starting wars versus getting involved in existing conflicts, we're not even talking about right versus wrong, we're talking about Pentagon spending and who benefits. The U.S. giving Ukraine our older weapons stockpiles so we can create NEW stockpiles doesn't speak to who started what, but that Democrats were sure in favor of increased spending while Republicans weren't. The assertion was one party always wants more spending on "defense" while one party doesn't. It simply isn't true, both parties are happy to find justifications to increase the Pentagon's budget.
Rendering it somewhat redundant...
Edit: this comment was made before the person I was responding to edited their post to include the second line.
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> "In our nation's 248 year-history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump
And yet, the same person has advocated and pushed for greater powers to the presidency increasing the risks of such individual threats.
It's no coincidence that in the list of countries in the last 50 years that drifted from democracies to authoritarianism the tier of those that succeeded (the likes of Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey) are ALL presidential republics.
Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, while not being shy of power hungry smart individuals? None of them is a presidential republic. The play in such countries is the party-state identification, where the party takes control of key institutions, press and in the right situation can also grab more. But it's never as simple or easy as in presidential republics.
In fact, I think that Sri Lanka is the last fully parliamentary democracy to shit into full authoritarianism, and that happened almost 50 years ago.
I can't but wonder whether US citizens realize that the constitution is dated, written for different times and with much less experience and lessons to learn from other democracies. It shows all the cracks of presidential democracies:
- constitutions where 2 or more branches of government can claim public mandate through elections (in US case president + congress) which unavoidably clash, for no greater good.
- hard to impeach/remove branch. Say what you want about many democracies in Europe for changing governments frequently, but you're always one single majority vote away from having to resign.
- cult of personality. Presidential republics, by electing an individual instead of a parliament/coalition are much more prone to personality cults.
US has all of those ingredients and Cheney made sure to make these problems worse.
The successor presidencies of Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden decried the power grabs Cheney pursued but mostly pocketed his gains for their own purposes. (In his case for unrestricted bombing in the Caribbean and Pacific, Gaiser cited Obama’s own marginalization of Congress to bomb Libya in 2011.) Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in twenty-first-century America.
…
Cheney understood the catastrophe of 9/11 as an opportunity to accomplish and cement long-standing objectives. In the early days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cheney’s Pentagon commissioned a study on the future course of American power from Paul Wolfowitz, an adviser who would later enjoy great influence in the Bush administration. The draft document prioritized the active prevention of a peer competitor to US power from emerging. The objective of US grand strategy would be to preserve military, economic and geopolitical preeminence indefinitely. As he would when he became vice president, Cheney relied on a corps of neoconservative intellectuals he cultivated to supply the pertinent rationales. For Cheney, the virtues of dominance were self-evident. After 9/11, they drove him to favor invading not only Afghanistan, but the unconnected country of Iraq, whose regime was an outlier in the world America bestrode. A document contained in an energy task force Cheney convened before 9/11, and that he went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret, detailed “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.“
…
In the months after 9/11, these Cheneyite lawyers, wielding their boss’ influence, created in the shadows an architecture of repression. Addington wrote a draft directive permitting the National Security Agency, in defiance of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, to establish a warrantless digital dragnet of phone and internet metadata generated by the communications of practically every American. Flanigan, aided by Yoo, wrote the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that made the world into a battlefield at the direction of the president. They further permitted, encouraged, and protected the CIA in launching a regimen of torture-as-geopolitical-revenge, masquerading as intelligence gathering, as well as a network of secret prisons to detain the agency’s alleged-terrorist captives indefinitely. They declared that battlefield captives could be held as “unlawful enemy combatants,” deserving none of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and corralled them, without charge, into the military base at Guantánamo Bay until an end of hostilities that might never arrive. With the exception of CIA torture and much of the wholesale domestic acquisition of Americans’ metadata, these authorities and practices, in one form or another, persist to this day.
Cheney did all of this because his deepest conviction was that the presidency was an elected monarchy. Misconstruing an argument of Alexander Hamilton’s from Federalist 70, Cheney pursued what became known as the Unitary Executive Theory. It was predicated on the idea of an unencumbered presidency empowered to control every aspect of the executive branch, regardless of any affected office or agency’s intended independence from political decisions. Cheney had understood the post-Watergate reforms from Nixon’s criminal presidency as a congressional usurpation, and he intended to roll them all back. Excluding Congress from wresting any transparency from his secret Energy Task Force was, to Cheney, part of the point. After 9/11, Yoo contended that during wartime – a circumstance conceivably permanent in a War on Terror – presidential authority is all but plenary. He likes his argument a lot less now that Trump uses it to murder fishermen in the Caribbean, but, like his Bush administration colleagues, takes no responsibility for authoring the authoritarian usurpations of power that he now bemoans.
Vaya con dios, Dick… vaya con dios.
Tanta paz se lleve como descanso deja.
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What bias? Looks pretty neutral to me.
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I think a lot of people would disagree with that statement that he is a patriot. My own opinion is that he's more of a profiteer than a patriot.
I think he was a patriot. That’s what made him so dangerous. He believed he had the best interests of the nation at heart. He probably convinced himself that Iraq really did pose a threat.
Do you know what a psychopath is? They aren't that rare you know.
His administration admitted to lying about weapons of mass destruction in order to invade Iraq.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, thousands of Americans died, and trillions were wasted.
He was a traitor to his country, not a patriot.
I don't care one way or another that he's dead, but let's not whitewash his legacy.
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You'd think so, but somehow I doubt it.
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Even someone who condemned tens of thousands of people to death largely just for personal financial gain?
Would "it was never about the money, we really believed in it" be a better justification for same acts?
I don't think he did it largely for personnel gain. I do think he personally gained but look at every political decision ever made. There are winners and losers. Almost none of them are 100% based on altruism. How does any Senator enter government with a net worth of a 100k and 5 years later is worth millions on a salary of 174k while supporting 2 households (DC and home state). All of them grift. All of them vote for things that end up killing or harming people. That is the nature of government and the nature of military super powers.
Don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting he was a good person just that he was a person.
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> I do find it ironic, however, that someone as far right as him (and his extremest daughter) are still seen as DINOs by Trumpers.
IIRC, his _other_ daughter is gay, leading him to be noticeably silent during the period when passing anti-gay-marriage legislation was a core issue of the GOP, which explains a great deal of the RINO accusation (I assume you actually meant RINO, not DINO :) )
Now I didn't like the man or his legacy, but I always find it interesting to compare the HN response for controversial figures' deaths.
It's a pretty stark difference depending on the political alignment. Scan the tone of these comments, and then scan Castro's for example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886
Jack Welch is also another that didn't receive much love here:
(and he certainly was not as controversial or brutal as Castro)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464733
It’s natural for people to care more about things that directly affect them.
Castro was in a foreign country I’ve never been to, and did most of his stuff before I was even born. His death was largely a realization that somebody from the history books had still been alive.
Cheney, in contrast, fucked with my home while I was an adult. He and his cabal did massive damage to my country very recently. I’m not going to make travel arrangements to visit his grave so I can piss on it, but I am tempted to.
What exactly do you want to say in here? The Castro is called evil a lot in that discussion. Welch is criticized. People here right now seem to complain about Cheney.
That was your honest takeaway from the Castro thread?
How many glorifying top comments did you scroll through to find him being called evil?
Fidel Castro executed and tortured people.
Jack Welch fired some people.
The general sentiment towards Welch's death was very negative.
The general sentiment towards Castro's death was very positive.
Does that clear things up?
Yes, as I skimmed it, I caught mostly comments calling him evil. Very colorfully.
Luckily we all have the link and can see the top comments so we don't have to live in your reality.
You can't be arguing in good faith as it's clear as day the general sentiment difference between the posts.
Jack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love. If you had to say something positive about him, it would be something like "well if he hadn't done it, someone else would have". That is not a high bar. You can give him credit for showing us that the foundations of our approach is rotten. He's a bit like Trump in that :-/
And what can you say positive about Cheney?
"Yeah his fingerprints are all over every bad policy decision of the era but at least he shot an old lawyer in the face"
Yes it's that type of comment I'm talking about.
Pretty much sums up his HN death post, while you'll find mostly praise for Castro.
You'd think Welch executed and tortured people and Castro was a saint.
> Jack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love.
He may have eventually have 'found religion':
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[69]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics
However this was probably much later and when his image was less influential; his earlier career and fame probably really helped accelerate financialisation, and was probably never reset by his later opinions (partly because they may not have been as widely publicized).
Though on climate change:
> Welch identified politically as a Republican.[66] He stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis".[67] Yet he said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not ... because the world wants these products".[68]
* Ibid
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[69]
Rather odd to see this quote coming from Welch, the man who almost single-handedly destroyed the notion that corporations had a duty to employees, and society at large first, and shareholder value coming as a result of those.
His actions, and management style completely defined the era of corporate behaviour we live since the 1980s: the layoffs, the carelessness on axing whole departments of companies which underperformed for a couple of quarters, only looking through short-term financials, all the focus on quarterly reports and financialisation of the economy come from his "teachings".
It was very hard for me to believe he uttered these words, rot in hell, Jack.
Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.
Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.
I'd say the assessments are accurate. [^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
Your history of Castro is extremely whitewashed.
You forgot the mention the political prisoners, torture, executions, and the authoritarian regime overall.
Thousands have risked their lives trying to escape it.
The juxtaposition of the comments between Welch and Castro is appalling.
Cheney and Castro are closer in terms that they both caused unnecessary death, but one gets praise upon death, and the other condemnation.
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actually I've been detecting a sharp increase in US rightwingness and nationalism comments on HN. I was wondering if it was just trolling or HN was now on some bot list or if there was a real change in sentiment in the US?
There is a real change in sentiment in the US. Note the last election results.
But also there has been an increasing amount of polarization to both the left and the right from the center. Likely in part due to social media filter bubbles.
I doubt there has been much change in numbers, those on the right are just willing to be a little more visible now. It helps that HN is for the most part an anon. site.
Kind of an odd move to pepper the HN thread on Dick Cheney’s death with non-sequitur comments about “the left”
Agreed. Besides, "left" and "right" are particularly meaningless in this context.
Cheney spent his last years being openly embraced by the same people who spent the last few decades playing the part of opposition.
Current right wing propaganda utilizes a strategy of "flood the zone", based on the "Russian firehose" approach.
This means injecting all talking points all of the time, and disrupting any criticism anywhere.
LLMs make this easier and more effective, and HN is absolutely, 100% owned by bots. And in like a literal sense, given who YCombinator funds and is headed by.
couple of points. 1. I'm not a bot. I'm just politically right, we are around, we just hide because its still career suicide in tech. I know you don't see the right as human but most of us are people just like you, not LLMs
2. I just like to chat on HN, there is no right wing mass organized process for people to chat with others, or at least none that I am a part of. To think that everyone you disagree with must be a bot or part of a conspiracy is both dehumanizing and just... an odd way to see the world.
3. The OP I responded to specifically mentioned the difference responses to the deaths of well known people. Mentioning Castro and comparing to Cheney. That was the context of my response, not sure how this has now veered into organized conspiracy theories
The OP I responded to specifically mentioned the difference responses to the deaths of well known people. Mentioning Castro and comparing to Cheney.
Really? The VC ecosystem and most of tech leadership is pretty alt to hard right now.
IMO that is different than rank-and-file. My theory is that once you make a certain amount of money you run a high risk of becoming divorced from reality.
I think it's useful to separate "tech" from "the VC ecosystem" and "most of tech leadership", the former being a huge range of people, while the latter two being a small group comparatively.
Not to mention HN is yet another sub-section of the "tech" ecosystem with a small cross-section of VC and startups, although that was indeed the focus on the beginning, I think the scope of HN has grown quite a lot since its beginnings.
Most of tech leadership blows with the wind, they have no firm beliefs. Whatever drives shareholder value. See Zuck. Although I do agree those more to the right have been emboldened to speak up a little more. I think the vast majority of the rank and file including managers are still on the left
I disagree but I also find it funny that people will spout off their respective political ideas then get butt hurt that others don't like them.
Maybe keep it to yourself. Keep it all to your self.
I think any article that espouses a political slant will have political comments which I welcome. I enjoy hearing from people with different leanings and discussing them. I just get frustrated when they are based on emotion and not reason
Yeah, but Cheney's an interesting one especially here.
Probably a lot of permanent D.C. types lost track of whether to lionize or demonize the man in public (they always loved him privately)
Oh, what a tangled web ...
What a legend.