I’m going to blow my brains out.
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Having an anti-China take, ok whatever. You’re wrong, but whatever. But this bozo is also anti-MAS and in favor of whoever that CIA sponsored dude in Ecuador is. Seems… odd.
How can anyone with even an iota of leftist consciousness not at least critically support MAS? I am being super fucking generous to them here too, MAS is fucking amazing!
She says she’s an “anarchist” in her twitter bio (I use quotes b/c I love my actual anarchist comrades, you all are cool), but even that doesn’t explain it. Like I literally don’t know how someone could be against MAS.
Another point on the “competency” discussion is that you don’t need to be particularly competent if you (1) have all the resources the most powerful country on the planet can muster and (2) can get caught and still largely get away without punishment.
Say you or I want to bug someone’s home. Where do we get a bug? If nice equipment costs $10K, where do we get the money? How are we going to break into someone’s house undetected? Say we need to find out when they’re gone, the type of lock they have, and how to pick it – how are we doing surveillance? If we go online to do research or talk to a locksmith, does that leave an incriminating trail of evidence? How are we going to go through all the hours of recordings to make sense of any of it? If we need any help in this endeavor, how are we going to find willing, trustworthy people? If we get caught, how many years are we spending in prison?
All of this shit gets real easy if you have the resources, authority, and ass-covering ability of a federal agency. Competency isn’t what makes the CIA dangerous – it’s that if they want to fuck with you, they can put a dozen people on the job, and if you find out you’re being fucked with you have no recourse.
As a anarchist leaning leftist I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea that since tankies think the CIA is bad… It’s good actually. Like no that’s one thing every leftist should absolutely agree on.
As much fun as it is to laugh at Castro’s exploding cigars or whatever, I think the narrative of CIA as a bunch of incompetents is actually pretty harmful to the left. Sure they’ve done a few really dumb things, but they’ve been incredibly fucking effective in staging coups, assassinations, and all sorts of other horrific shit, like look into pretty much every bad thing in the last 70-odd years and it’s bound to have their grubby little pawprints all over it. That’s a pretty fucking good strikerate, and painting them as incompetent can make us lose sight of just how effective they’ve been at fucking up the world
To the agent reading this: when you’re done jerking yourself off, please go throw yourself off a cliff in minecraft
when you have unlimited resources and backed by the most powerful state in human history, you can afford to be incompetent once in while.
The CIA isn’t incompetent. The CIA has enough funding and political power to throw everything, including Wiley Cayoty contraptions, at the wall to see what sticks. We just only hear about what goes wrong. That way they can get more funding and hide their actual insidious shit.
Yeah and to add to this, imagine that the exploding cigars had worked - we would have been hearing “lol commies so stupid died from an exploding cigar what a chump” for decades now from the most insufferable people on earth, it would have been a huge propaganda win beyond just killing Castro. So yeah if I was in charge of the CIA, fuck it why not give it a shot?
“Smoke my cigar” would become the new “ride my helicopter” for reactionaries.
I think MK-Ultra is a good example of this. There are a lot of people who know about it, but only as agents bumbling around putting LSD in each other’s coffee, not developing torture techniques they later exported around the world. I’m sure the CIA prefers the former.
I mean, what we know about MKULTRA is what CIA decided to release about it. It’s not a coincidence.
And the only reason we even know THAT is because they archived 20k pages or so in the financial building by accident. The rest of the info was all destroyed for being way too spicy, I imagine.
Kill thinking in absolute terms. The CIA is a big organization. Some of the shit they’ve done has been consummately professional (we don’t hear about it until decades later). Some of the shit they’ve done is laughably incompetent (having their entire spy network compromised in China). Some of the spooks are dull and complacent. Some are vicious predators. All of it’s true at once, we just have to look at individual actions, agents, operations which can vary wildly and judge accordingly. Think they’re all hyper diligent masters of counter intelligence misses opportunity for exploitation and growth, thinking they’re bungling bureaucrats misses the serious coups and destabilization they pull off regularly.
In conclusion, it’s always a little of both -Derrida
Yeah instead of saying “CIA” we should say “um there may exist a person or persons in the Central Intelligence Agency who may potentially be doing specifically this bad thing, not necessarily literally every single person there but potentially 1+ people who may be involved with this specific thing thank you.” That’s really how we should be analyzing history and events and talking about them right?
And 99% of the time, yes it literally is every single person that works there. There are no “social-democrat including black people and poor people in other countries” CIA agents or people who work there (maybe not even the janitors and fast food cooks) lmao. That’s not how the hiring process works. Like how long after their first screw-over-these-poor-people campaign do you think your average non-psycho lib would last before becoming a ‘double agent’ or quitting?
I think you may have misunderstood, comrade. I’m not attempting in any way to defend the CIA – I said that it has both incompetent and competent agents, successful operations and ones that seem like they’re a literal joke, and if we try and say the CIA is only competent or incompetent we’re going to make mistakes and miss opportunities.
My feelings in pictogram form:
:amerikkka:
:M16: :cia: :bottle:
:match: :luau: :liberty-weeping:
:sicko-yes: :left-unity-3: :no-police: :gui-better: :acab:
There was a post that popped up on the askhistorians sub about the difference in Soviet and American intelligence operations, and despite the terminal liberal brainworms that you’d expect it did a good job of pointing out how the CIA was horribly incompetent in certain areas and just made up for it by functionally having limitless money to throw at problems and having unmatched access to material assets. They’re terrible at actually building networks, but pretty good at waving giant piles of money around and screaming “hey fuckers whoever brings us shit we want gets set up for life” or just throwing money and guns at a conflict to escalate it.
