Re:Culture eats policyiculty of gov software procurement
by pdonis on Saturday June 24, 2023 @05:12PM
(#36462695)
> Maybe you don’t like the outcomes, but it can’t be argued that much was accomplished.
So you're perfectly OK with a government that accomplishes a lot of things that should not have been accomplished, as long as it does so efficiently?
To give just one example: FDR's administration systematically concealed from the American public the true nature of the Soviet Union, which, even before World War II started, had already killed many millions more of its own people than Nazi Germany would kill by the end of WW II, and sent to concentration camps many millions more still. FDR and his administration knew this because FDR had been sending top advisers of his over to the Soviet Union to meet with Stalin all during the 1930s, and Stalin was not at all reticent about explaining his grand plans for sanitizing his country of dissidents. Concealing all this was the only reason why the American public accepted the Soviet Union as an ally in WW II (and even then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had to be whitewashed as a temporary aberration by an otherwise reliable ally, instead of the cynical manipulation that it actually was).
And the result of that was that a war which was started in order to free Eastern Europe from a totalitarian dictatorship, Nazi Germany, left Eastern Europe in the hands of an even worse totalitarian dictatorship, the Soviet Union. In short, the bloodiest, costliest war in human history was a failure, and that failure is directly attributable to FDR and his administration. Oh, it was all done efficiently, yes: everybody was so convinced that it was a great outcome that, after the end of WW II, Eisenhower sat next to Stalin and watched a parade of the Red Army through Red Square in Moscow and told Stalin how great it was, and the New York Times gushed over it. Ok by you?
So you're perfectly OK with a government that accomplishes a lot of things that should not have been accomplished, as long as it does so efficiently?
To give just one example: FDR's administration systematically concealed from the American public the true nature of the Soviet Union, which, even before World War II started, had already killed many millions more of its own people than Nazi Germany would kill by the end of WW II, and sent to concentration camps many millions more still. FDR and his administration knew this because FDR had been sending top advisers of his over to the Soviet Union to meet with Stalin all during the 1930s, and Stalin was not at all reticent about explaining his grand plans for sanitizing his country of dissidents. Concealing all this was the only reason why the American public accepted the Soviet Union as an ally in WW II (and even then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had to be whitewashed as a temporary aberration by an otherwise reliable ally, instead of the cynical manipulation that it actually was).
And the result of that was that a war which was started in order to free Eastern Europe from a totalitarian dictatorship, Nazi Germany, left Eastern Europe in the hands of an even worse totalitarian dictatorship, the Soviet Union. In short, the bloodiest, costliest war in human history was a failure, and that failure is directly attributable to FDR and his administration. Oh, it was all done efficiently, yes: everybody was so convinced that it was a great outcome that, after the end of WW II, Eisenhower sat next to Stalin and watched a parade of the Red Army through Red Square in Moscow and told Stalin how great it was, and the New York Times gushed over it. Ok by you?