No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.
That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.
These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.
No, today institutions like Georgia Tech -- which has an endowment of just about the same as MIT in the nineties adjusted for inflation -- seem to function just about the same way as MIT did back then.
I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.
And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.
Anywhere the nerds or artists go, if they are good, eventually becomes overrun with such types. Just look at the state of Silicon Valley and y combinator, and gentrification in general…
Curiosity: Some facial biometrics are explicitly designed to they can't change over time, barring an accident or similar. They look at features of facial geometry such as eye versus nose positioning and similar kinds of things set by bone structure.
They're surprisingly hard to intentionally defeat. Growing a beard, putting on weight, etc. won't do it.
I looked into this some time ago, when I didn't want to be tracked. It turned out to be annoyingly hard. And e.g. "wear a hat and mask" makes you rather conspicuous.
The increasingly universal cameras are rather effective at knowing what you're doing at all times.
Having worked in / adjacent several such industries, a lot of the question depends on scale.
A trillion-dollar business can easily trade dollars for the privacy. A business with $1M to spend won't even get a phone call with OpenAI or Anthropic, who were the only* previous players in town for doing this.
Worst-case example: Bootstrapped startup working in military.
It's also the case that an open model enables many more intermediate-cost solutions. E.g. providers certified for specific applications, on-prem rentals, etc.
* Omitting Azure, which gives some privacy for some $$$ on their models, but not at the level of high-security.
> Worst-case example: Bootstrapped startup working in military.
That's the easiest case.
AWS Bedrock models running in AWS Secret Cloud for Industry. (I really have no affiliation with them, I'm just like... this is a completely solved problem, why do people think this is hard and requires on-prem hardware?)
I'm with GP that these are tinfoil hat concerns, when there are solutions to all of these, unless you're perhaps in some country with very specific needs beyond things like European sovereignty or US military secrets (like a non-US defense concern).
You seem to be categorizing everything that considers their data being in the possession of the US an unacceptable risk to be tinfoil hat, which is kind of an insult to a large portion of the world. If you haven't been paying attention to the news in the last 48 months, the political reality has shifted considerably.
Note that the other commenter never said US-based military oriented startup. You just assumed, then jumped to "heck yeah let's use Amazon Secret Cloud for Industry"
Not everyone has or wants an office in Crystal City.
> Omitting Azure, which gives some privacy for some $$$ on their models, but not at the level of high-security.
If I were ranking third parties on their ability to safely handle my data without compromising it, I would rank Anthropic pretty low for things like Fable (where they more or less promise that they will misuse my data), but I want Azure pretty low in the sense that I fully expect them to be compromised.
I would tend to trust Amazon to avoid being compromised.
At least for regulated applications I worked on, no one cared.
The provider needs to comply with specific rules, have specific certifications, and sign specific agreements. You check the boxes, and you're good to go.
Microsoft does that better than anyone. OpenAI and Anthropic don't do that at all. Google does that rarely and poorly. AWS is not bad, but not as good as Microsoft.
Azure was always my go-to for regulated applications in the cloud. Some do require e.g. on-prem or even air gap, where even Azure is out.
> Better security, better reliability, better modularity. Better security because in a muicrokernel [sic] system a bug in one driver only gives an attacker access to that subsystem (or maybe even that driver), as opposed to having unlimited access to the whole system like is the case with mainstream operating systems today. Better relaibility [sic] becasue [sic] a crash in one subsystem only crashes that subsystem instead of crashing everything; if windows were a microkernel system then the crowdstrike bug would have just stopped some IT security staff from getting telemetry instead of being front page news. If linux were a microkernel system then the linux kernel team wouldn't be responsible for merging every driver for every hardware device, and wouldn't be responsible for vetting code that they would have to become experts on the inner workings of every chip supported by the linux kernel to properly vet.
Is false. In particular:
- A kernel-level exploit can almost always be escalated. If I control your filesystem, you're SOL
- A kernel-level crash in any subsystem brings down the whole system. If your file system crashes, or your GPU is in an unstable state, there is no coming back
- Modularity is a question of clear boundaries. Whether those are static linking, dynamic linking, or XML-RPC doesn't change the level of modularity.
And so on.
Basically, none of the upsides have panned out. On the other hand, code complexity explodes. Microservices need to know who to call how. The whole "a crash in one subsystem only crashes that subsystem instead of crashing everything" means every subsystem needs defensive code for things going wrong elsewhere. KLOCs go up, bugs/KLOC stay constant, and things get less stable.
Plus, it's hard to reason about systemically, and without excellent telemetry, neigh-impossible to debug.
What commercial microkernel systems are you referencing that suffer from trivial LPEs? Or whole system DoS from unprivileged code execution? To the extent that you argue your alleged failure modes are fundamental.
> none of the upsides have panned out
Again, what history? What proof? What evidence?
One of the stated upsides relative to monolithic kernels is superior reliability. There are numerous microkernels reliable enough for usage in critical flight systems. None of the standard commercial monolithic kernels are even in the vicinity of that.
Another of the stated upsides is superior security. There are multiple microkernels secure enough to be platforms for systems that need to be secure against state actors. None of the standard commercial monolithic kernels are even in the vicinity of that.
History has proven the opposite of your claims. The concrete evidence is the opposite of your vague unsupported assertions.
To get to microkernels, we're reaching for QNX and Minix.
Monolithic kernels won *hard* with good reason.
> critical flight systems
Hard RTOS is a whole different domain of engineering. You're very confused if you think the same principles apply to something which makes sense in a mainstream OS.
You did not claim that microkernels were less commercially successful.
You claimed that microkernels suffer from the same security problems that plague commercial monolithic kernels such as Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, etc.
You claimed without evidence, and I quote, “none of the upsides have panned out”.
In contrast, microkernels have completely dominated the field, displacing prior monolithic kernel solutions, in domains where reliability and security are not the lowest priority. All you have really supported is that the broader commercial IT landscape continues to prefer easily hacked systems as long as they can save a buck.
You claimed without evidence, or more accurately, bad evidence, confusing RTOS with "reliability and security." And you were somehow confused that security mattered for systems with no network connection.
FYI: For most commercial network equipment (internet backbone and similar), reliability and security are the highest priority. Most of that is Linux, BSD, and friends.
> You claimed without evidence, or more accurately, bad evidence, confusing RTOS with "reliability and security."
That sentence is grammatical nonsense. Try again to articulate your point so it is coherent.
Furthermore, you have still failed to present any historical examples for literally any of your bullet points or articulate any of the claimed upsides you purport have failed to pan out. In contrast, I have pointed out two frequently claimed upsides, reliability and security, that have demonstrably succeeded to such a degree that prevailing monolithic systems were largely replaced with microkernel systems in domains where reliability and security are highly valued such as aerospace and defense. To the extent that monolithic systems are still used, they were either the legacy option that has not been replaced or chosen where cost reduction is the highest priority, not security and reliability.
> FYI: For most commercial network equipment (internet backbone and similar), reliability and security are the highest priority.
Frankly, I find it baffling that you think that nuclear weapon systems, military jet fighters (which are network connected by the way), and commercial jetliners (also network connected) have lower reliability and security requirements than commercial networking equipment. And this is ignoring the fact that commercial networking equipment is some of the worst with respect to reliability and security. Cisco, one of the largest vendors in the space, routinely has trivial remote authentication bypasses allowing complete takeover. Here is one from last month: https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2026-20181. One from earlier this year: https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2026-20079. Or this one: https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2026-20127. How about this one: https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2026-20182.
Commercial networking equipment security is a joke. Find me literally any technical person who would claim that Cisco can defend against state actors. I will wait.
I can’t say I know much about kernels, but what you say rings true. It’s not unlike the micro service vs monolith argument. It depends on the use cases, but in a system where the micro services depend on each other, all you have is a distributed monolith. All the complexity and overhead, and none of the benefits. Keep dependencies close.
Device drivers as separate processes might not improve much the resistance against intentional exploits, but they would certainly greatly improve the resistance against bugs.
There are parts that are so simple that it can be practically guaranteed that they are bug free, e.g. the keyboard driver. Also the microkernel itself can be practically bug-free.
A GPU driver is unlikely to ever be bug free, but if the GPU is in an unstable state, because the keyboard should still be working fine, it should be easy to reset the GPU and continue the work without rebooting the computer.
On Linux I have seen cases when the GPU crashed, but switching to a virtual console and back avoided the reboot, by reinitializing the GPU, but I have also seen crashes when not even the keyboard worked, which should never happen, so a reboot was the only solution.
With device drivers in separate processes, bugs in one should not corrupt the memory of others, so restarting a device driver should be enough, instead of rebooting the computer.
> Microservices need to know who to call how
Here there is no difference between a monolithic kernel and a microkernel. With a monolithic kernel, the applications need to know which syscalls to use.
Libraries like libc or liburing can be implemented either by using syscalls to a monolithic kernel or messages to the processes that own peripheral devices, without any change in the API used by application programs. Obtaining memory pages shared with device driver processes can be done by creating file mappings for some pseudo-files with standard names, which has no essential difference from doing I/O by opening device nodes from the /dev pseudo-filesystem in UNIX-like OSes.
Any complex program must be designed from the beginning to be easy to test and debug. If the device drivers are distinct processes, there is no reason to be more difficult to debug them. On the contrary, because the interactions between them are more limited than when they live in a common address space, they should be easier to debug.
A micro-kernel with the associated device driver processes would contain more or less the same code that is now included in the Linux kernel or in any other monolithic kernel but it would be separated in multiple parts with clear boundaries and interfaces between them.
This can only make much easier the reasoning about how the entire system works. The downside is that the interfaces must be well defined. The history of Linux shows a huge number of badly defined interfaces, which later had to be changed. Even in the syscalls, which are supposed to be stable, there are many syscalls already at their fourth or fifth variant, with the previous variants still kept around despite being obsolete, for backwards compatibility with legacy programs.
Nevertheless, defining good interfaces is not that difficult, especially today when there is much less pressure to save every bit in a parameter list (even when taking into account the current memory prices). Most Linux interfaces that had to be replaced were replaced for not having features that were obvious as necessary since the beginning, e.g. for not having a parameter with option-encoding flags or for using some data types that were too small.
Funnily enough, "GPU" (video driver) on Linux used to be microkernel-like: the Xorg would run in userspace and talk to device directly. It was exactly as you described - if Xorg crashed, you could use keyboard shortcut to reinitialize it.
And the major motivators for KMS/DRM, which moved a lot of that functionality into kernel, was performance and stability.
> A GPU driver is unlikely to ever be bug free, but if the GPU is in an unstable state, because the keyboard should still be working fine, it should be easy to reset the GPU and continue the work without rebooting the computer.
Yes, it should be. I can name zero times in the past half-decade that it's been possible to soft-reset the hardware in my GPU.
The "reset the GPU switch" is the power switch on my computer.
That's true of most hardware. If my ethernet, wifi, or whatever else enter an unstable state, on paper, the monolithic kernel can do the same thing as the microkernel: unload the module, then reload the module. In practice, I've virtually never seen a driver able to pick up a piece of hardware in an unstable state and be able to "reset" it.
> With device drivers in separate processes, bugs in one should not corrupt the memory of others, so restarting a device driver should be enough, instead of rebooting the computer.
Device drivers can corrupt other devices easily enough. The hardware itself would need to be built for isolation.
> Any complex program must be designed from the beginning to be easy to test and debug. If the device drivers are distinct processes, there is no reason to be more difficult to debug them. On the contrary, because the interactions between them are more limited than when they live in a common address space, they should be easier to debug.
That's exactly the myth.
In practice, a complex data flow for a heisenbug might start at the network layer, go through the disk, and land on the GPU. Tracing that on a microkernel requires instrumentation which, while possible in theory, I've never seen in practice.
I'd love to see a hardware stack where everything is ECC, devices are isolated, etc. but for now, on a typical computer, plugging in a bad USB device can brick the whole system (regardless of the software on it). The assumption is that devices on your PCIe bus can be trusted.
> This can only make much easier the reasoning about how the entire system works.
You make very strong statements, without support.
There's a reason Linux runs on every Android phone, almost every router, and increasingly, devices like home microwaves.
I think the corollary is about taxpayer accountability.
It's easy to make the argument:
"If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness."
That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industrial policy, it's about cold, hard economics.
One step more complex -- but equally high ROI -- is towards having a functioning democracy. That's economics, but a bit more squishy.
Investing in the arts, humanities, and music is a good thing as well. However, that's a very different bucket of money. I wouldn't lump it in with the former two.
I believe the argument was that they do contribute to a functioning democracy, as opposed to investment in training nurses and carpenters, who are being trained for economic reasons. The argument was that the two goals are so different that they should be funded differently.
The things thay directly help democracy are well considered viewpoints, humanities research, journalism, law etc. Stuff that influences decision makers including voters hopefully roughly for a greater good although we all may disagree exactly what that means.
Nurses and carpenters help society and functioning civilization.
For that to work, what you need is for the nurses and carpenters to be well versed in basic economics and how pundits lie with statistics etc. for when they go to the polls, rather than to have an oversupply of English majors who go on to have careers as a Walmart greeter or become structurally unemployed.
In other words, we need more people with a minor in the humanities and fewer people with a major in it.
Their direct work output contributes to a functioning democracy, but does so indirectly by providing material goods and services, which I refer to by the shorthand "economic reasons". We don't train nurses and carpenters because their training directly supports democracy; we train them because we want to live inside and be cared for when needed, and these things are incidentally good for any society, democratic or otherwise.
They may of course contribute as individuals, too, but their training is not required for them to do so.
Regardless of whether we classify it as humanities or political science (as neither seems to be looked at as terribly useful in the states), a population without some grasp of civics does not lend itself to a healthy democracy
Not everyone must be a plumber or electrician, but we're well-served by having some basic knowledge, and an ability to find answers to the questions that arise as we do basic handywork, such as changing a lightswitch or replacing a faucet. Similarly, we are well-served as a society when we can answer basic questions about our democracy past the age of 18; IE, shortly after testing ends, and typically before it actually matters - when voting.
Not everyone needs to become a licensed electrician, or have a deeper-than-average understanding of civics. But knowing someone you can trust with an answer that isn't purely to line their own pocket is still important.
I usually don't like to get into these subjects on HN, but I'll expand just a little bit on what I mean.
All political systems (all of them) have "holes" in that they're more or less dependent on individual virtue to function in a long-term fashion - some of them having holes so large they can only work as naïve thought experiments with perfect civically-minded (thus imaginary) people - and not academic knowledge, which is completely orthogonal to said virtue.
That "grasp of civics" you're talking about is the same, it's not about knowing but being willing to make some real thankless efforts; the culprits in the proverbial "Tragedy of the commons" aren't ignorant.
i like your framing of "holes" in political systems.
one way to put it is that a political system has "holes" if the ideal/desired outcome is not a Nash equilibrium.
however, my understanding (though i can't speak for the other commenters) is that the reasoning behind "humanities-educated people make better democracies" is NOT that humanities-educated people are more virtuous, and thus will willingly not degrade the commons (the reasoning you seem to be criticizing). rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).
the usually cited problem with democracy is that it gives the people the power to choose, but it does not automatically makes them capable to make good choices. that's where the education comes in.
clearly many questions require technical/domain knowledge to be answered and are not simply a matter of preference. for example, fixing your car, or building a bridge. and even running a business or cooking an elaborate meal. with technical knowledge, you are able to make better decisions whatever your preferences are. humanities education is then implied to be the "technical knowledge" for participating in society.
of course, in that case, we can discuss what should be the content of the "humanities education", but that's another discussion...
> rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).
I can see where your reasoning is coming from but I mostly disagree. I can see two factors that could prevent manipulation: 1. The rare case of wisdom (that I define as being strong willed enough to think independently and not fall for self-deception/wishful thinking + intelligent enough to think correctly) which doesn't apply here since education doesn't influence this and 2. Manipulation going too much against the previous indoctrination, which does apply here but kinda defeats the point.
In fact, I'm mostly distrustful of intellectuals (!= intelligent people). That misattributed Thucydides quote about scholars ("The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.") further illustrated by Uncle Ted ("Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today.") summarize my position.
Where I do agree is that practical/technical knowledge allowing individuals to be more independent and less reliant on specialized technicians to change a light bulb is highly important. Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so (cf modern cars, appliances or operating systems). I suspect that this isn't a coincidence considering the aforementioned ramifications...
i agree that wisdom / an independent thinking spirit is an important factor to prevent manipulation and that it's not something easily taught.
but i also believe that in fact knowledge is another very important factor in resisting manipulation (absent from your list), and more generally, being part of a functioning democracy.
i mean here knowledge of lofty things like history, economics, sociology, which can then serve as a base to know and understand more practical things, like laws, regulations, taxes, government subsidies, or how roads, schools, or health insurance is funded -- otherwise how could anyone make any decision regarding these topics? and all of these things can be taught.
independent thinking is important but with zero knowledge you could maybe be convinced to join a cult or something, for example. like, for ancient peasants the king was effectively a god anyway.
of course, all of this is highly idealized. i agree with you and Uncle Ted. academia, in practice, often is not a place that champions these ideals. but maybe it could be.
> Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so
Last time someone got rejected from art school, there was a bit of a fascism that happened, so investing in arts totally contributes to functioning democracy!
Here we have an example of someone who see college/university as a vocational training center for worker, instead of seeing it as higher education that inspire civilized thinker.
... or someone who has a hard time seeing how most actual arts, music, and humanities college degrees have that impact.
Examples of things with high-impact towards civics:
- Philosophy, especially political philosophy. Aristotle, Confucius, Marx, Smith, ...
- History, political science, economics, journalism
- Theory of law, studied academically. Lawyers, for the most part, have the opposite effect.
- Anthropology + international relations
Examples of things which currently don't:
- Most major in art, film, visual studies, literature, African/women's/LGBTQ/Asian/... studies, language majors, linguistics, ...
This is a statement about the practice of such majors. For example:
* Art/film/... ought to contribute, historically has contributed, and in much of Europe, actually still does. In most of the US, it leads to either unemployment or work in advertising, and doesn't teach the right things.
* Looking at the experiences of different minorities ought to contribute. In practice, most of these majors are dysfunctional self-admiration cults, with people citing each other's work, due to misaligned incentive structures in academic hiring.
* It's no coincidence that the most important work in philosophy, in the past century, was not done by philosophy majors.
* A Chinese / French / Russian / ... major will place you about one tier down from a Chinese / French / Russian / ... immigrant in terms of... just about everything.
In either case, many of these things do still have value, but it's not the same funding bucket.
A lot of people severely underestimate the value and impact of the arts because they don't produce immediately visible results. But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times.
> One (or a few) sculpture can satisfy the needs of a large community.
I cannot disagree more. You may as well say that no one should tell stories anymore because we already have the Iliad and Hamlet. You may as well say that Vincent van Gogh was wasting his time picking up a paintbrush because we already had so many great Renaissance paintings.
Art isn't a commodity where you spend 15 minutes a day Admiring Art and it gives you the aesthetic equivalent of your daily protein intake.
> But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times
I completely agree with you, but
1) you can make art without taking out enormous loans and
2) if you want to pay cash or take out a private loan to attend these schools you still can
3) learning about art does not make you an artist, it makes you a museum curator.
The last one is probably the most important. An expensive degree does not make your painting more beautiful, or your notes more in-tune, or your bakery more delicious. It is a credential.
And it is false. Those are truthisms, except at one point, college can destroy people’s lives. College can teach people wrong things. College can misdirect people from being about to contribute to the economy and redirect them towards the political goals of the teachers, especially when those don’t derive revenue from their contribution to the economy. College can also misdirect people who would have been happier and more useful with immediate work.
There goes my demonstration: College can be harmful to society, it’s subjective to judge when the threshold was crossed. For my opinion, it was crossed in 2013 through politicization.
They're not "attacks." Anthropic calling them "attacks" doesn't make them attacks. Companies are collecting transcripts of conversations with Anthropic, and giving users a discount to share them.
As many have pointed out, they're collecting data in ways much less aggressive than Anthropic itself about what Anthropic does.
Anthropic doesn't like it, but I don't see this as "Chinese companies stealing IP," any more than if Google tried to ban competitors from seeing how Google Docs or an Android phone behaves, or Ford trying to ban anyone from Toyota from seeing what their car looks like.
Please stop calling them "attacks." It's distillation training. It's looking at what Anthropic does -- as a block box -- and trying to duplicate or beat it. It's how progress happens.
Stealing IP is an attack. You might feel that Anthropic should just give away hundreds of billions in IP and capex, but that's not the way the world works, and I don't agree with you. They're taking enormous risk to build these models. They should be fairly compensated.
And I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue the AI industry isn't being fairly compensated.
To go further: most people in the world wouldn't feel bad at all if we found a way to slow what's likely the biggest socio-polical-economic change in human history down a bit.
I didn't make an exceptionalist argument, but if any country's behavior and values can be measured compared to others, you will always be able to make some kind of decision about where those fall in terms of goodness or badness. Do you not believe in good and bad?
I don't believe in US good, non-US bad. I also don't believe the same about my religion or my political party, for that matter.
How you measure depends on weights you assign (cultural system of values) and what information you use (media bias).
You can rank in the extremes (e.g. North Korea as worse than Belgium), since they come out that way by almost any set of information and values. Comparing the US to most other countries, there isn't a clear ordering. If you believe the things you wrote, I think the other comment summed it up well: "You sound like you've swallowed pro-US-propaganda hook, line and sinker."
Most countries have similar propaganda, by the way.
Most countries have some kind of story they tell about themselves. New Zealand doesn't have any illusions that it is a superpower. It doesn't have the resources, the talent pool or any of that to even begin to dream of it. That is natural. If New Zealand was powerful, then it would find itself in a position of greater responsibility.
You cannot compare countries that barely have the option of ambition with something like the US and even begin to imagine that it is meaningful. You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US. You can rewind history to name other civilizations.
These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale. They have to answer about what the reasons were when things went wrong and whether they agree things went wrong. If people are even allowed to talk about it.
It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people. You can always find counter-examples, but how influential are they in the larger picture?
> These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale.
This is an extreme claim, and incorrect. If you'd like to see counterexamples, you'll see many corrupt regimes in Africa, which did extreme harm to their own people. You'll see many regional powers.
One does not need to be a global superpower to be good or evil.
There's also nothing magical about Germany or Japan. Many countries had similar resources. Both chose to invest those resources into industrial militarism.
One can make the argument for a handful of countries which our outliers for land area or population, but in general, if any country chooses to invest in military and attack its neighbors, it has good odds of success.
> You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US
Germany was an outlier, on the evil end, but otherwise, it's a selection of which facts one picks.
A comparison would require deciding which facts to compare on. For the US, the "evil" argument comes back to things like slavery and the genocide of the native peoples.
One can pick hundred of examples like Guantanamo Bay, fake vaccines in Pakistan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tusla massacre, police violence, corrupt court, ...
The US does pretty nasty things, even if they don't always make US news or grade school textbooks.
> It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people
This is an ad hominem, and a poorly placed one. You're discounting what people are telling you. A lot of the people here went through the US school system, learned "US rah rah rah" propaganda, and only deconditioned themselves as adults.
Many of us were where you are when we were younger.
It's largely correct, but you're missing the point. For many countries, it does not matter whether they are good or bad on a grander scale, because their power is so limited that they are largely confined. Countries that exist on the lower end of the intellectual development scale are expected to fall apart.
Not all countries are structured the same, are at the same stage of development, or resourced enough enough to arrive at a sense of responsibility.
That is why these countries are different. The US is the most different, because it is the only one of its kind. There is no other country you can compare the US to.
A lot of negative things about the US are being misrepresented or inflated by propaganda without sufficient context. It isn't all positive, but the US is a huge country and our history didn't begin 250 years ago.
> One can pick hundred of examples like Guantanamo Bay, fake vaccines in Pakistan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tusla massacre, police violence, corrupt court, ...
I could come up with way more examples than that, but for each example you have to ask the questions. You don't simply label an event and point at a face to say "bad, they did it and this is who they are". Is it true? Why did they do it. What were they thinking. Was it an accident, intentional, what was the context? What else was going on in the world, and what was the world like then? What were they up against? Was the choice easy or hard? Was the badness mitigated, or was it unmitigated badness?
> You're discounting what people are telling you. A lot of the people here went through the US school system, learned "US rah rah rah" propaganda, and only deconditioned themselves as adults.
Your unbalanced schooling is not a compelling argument for why I am wrong as much as it is a piece of evidence for why you lost perspective when you got older.
No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.
That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.