"But everyone does it " <---- ?!??

out of respect for the forum here, let's elucidate a bit. The History of Civilization on the one hand .. you know, the difference between a pack of animals and something that can endure via shared purpose.. The History of Conscious Choice (won't say the R**** word here) .. are both grounded in choosing higher ground so to speak.

At every stage, those who could cheat the rules for others, look good doing it, and take the rewards, had an economic/territory advantage. Those who serve in a uniform service are bound by law for real reasons !!

How can a single comment blithely dismiss the "Social Contract" and hand-supply a lame excuse as contribution to a social discussion ? Its the same mentality as 12 year olds stealing .. "everyone does it" is not the answer, not at all.

Welcome to a peek behind the world’s thin veneer.

You should see what goes on and who dies in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed.

Expose consumers to the true costs of goods and services in a moral world, and the world’s morals are going to start looking pretty different, pretty quickly.

> in order to keep our iPhone and gas prices down, and our children fed

Bullshit. None of that is for our sake. These people aren't running charities or ideologically driven; they're just greedy scumlords who would happily sell guns to 8 year olds, or systematically deny climate change for 50 years, if it made them money.

Resource extraction using brutality is pointless without a market for the extracted resources.

Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The claim that the US foreign policy agenda is promoting democratic values and human rights around the world, then, I guess that was just a two-faced con artist act?

The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets. How patriotic can you get?

> Ah so we are no better than China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: the world isn’t black and white, but shades of gray.

I think it’s both the case that the US does unsavory things and that the US is better than those nations on the subjects you’re talking about.

> The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else, and of course there's the kickback angle with the private contractors bloated secret budgets.

Compared to those nations you listed, I don’t think this claim is true.

"Democratic values and human rights" is just how we refer to "how we want it done" - when what we want goes against them, they fall away to the side and aren't talked about.

your first paragraph is just a reflection of the way the world works. You can take sides - most people do - or not. Either way the ethics are steeped in a complex of nationalism, ideology, media, state control, and everything in between.

Your second paragraph seems a tad hyperbolic. The intel machine is there to progress a country’s interests. Most of the time, it is for peaceful purposes, but agreed there is often a commercial interest at play.

Having met someone who was at the top of my country's intelligence machine: CIA is corrupt, other countries fare a bit better but not too well. It's a difficult problem to concentrate so much power and not have corruption.

> The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information

Citation needed. What a ridiculous thing to say.

Well, the NSA and CIA and the State Department have long claimed that their cyber-espionage activities have nothing to do with securing economic information for the advantage of say, US oil companies, right?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/longhorn-cybe...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...

Those claims seem to be false. Engaging in cyber-espionage (and indeed, going to war) for economic advantage seems to be the name of the game. Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?

> Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?

Maybe the actual decisionmakers of the world all already know how the world works.

You want a citation for secret stuff the spook agencies do?

Are you kidding me?

I'm not taking sides either way, but Hitchens's Razor does still apply here (i.e. "claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence").

In this case, some people have industry knowledge and some trust is in order

> The NSA and CIA are probably more interested in feeding Wall Street insider information on foreign economic activity so they can obtain advantages than anything else

Wall Street has pretty much shied away since Clarence Beeks blew the orange juice corner in 1983.

> I guess that was just a two-faced con artist act?

Of course it was. Read Chomsky.