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.
(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)
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.
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.
One of their documents from the '90s stipulated that to change public opinion for war there would have to have been be a significant "Pearl Harbour-like" event... which is something that naturally has stirred up a lot of conspiracy theorists.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
(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)
Until you learn it's not individuals, but groups of them with ideas that persist for multiple generations.
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.
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?|>
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.
One of their documents from the '90s stipulated that to change public opinion for war there would have to have been be a significant "Pearl Harbour-like" event... which is something that naturally has stirred up a lot of conspiracy theorists.
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...
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.
100yr from now shotgun buyers and sellers will still be cracking jokes about shooting lawyers.
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.
I remember the “20 ways Dick Cheney can kill you” posters. Unbelievable energy.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
Vaya con dios, Dick… vaya con dios.
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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.