Tfw you’re about to say the perfect thing that’ll totally own them and make everyone reading along realize what a charlatan the other side is, but you get a “comment chain too deep” error.

No it isn’t synonymous. Evidence is in principle unambiguous

That’s completely wrong. You don’t know what the word “evidence” means, evidence isn’t proof, and wrong ideas can have evidence.

If someone gets shot and the bullet is traced back to a gun you own, that’s evidence that you did it. Sufficient evidence that the cops are going to come by with a few questions, possibly even arrest you. But it doesn’t prove that you did it, the gun could’ve been stolen, for example, what it does is suggest that you did it.

Likewise, if someone develops some sort of health complication after being vaccinated, that’s evidence that suggests vaccines are harmful. It’s a very, very small piece of anecdotal evidence that’s outweighed by the overwhelming majority of evidence in the opposite direction, but it’s still evidence.

The word you’re looking for is “proof” or “conclusive evidence.” You are 100% wrong on this point.

(And it’s not a typo, it’s a factual mistake, as you’ve said.)

Actually, what I said is that I mixed it up with the date of a similar event, which is, you know, what a typo is.

Please reflect on the carelessness with which you’ve approached this argument that led to you making such mistakes.

I haven’t simultaneously claimed to be a leftist and that leftists should be experts in world history and economics, while you did

At every turn you’re attacking me, making a stereotype out of me and claiming I’ve said things I haven’t said in order…Do you find that I’ve done the same to you,

You’re doing it right here. What I was talking about is what is expected, and what you’ve demonstrated you expect, not what should actually be the expectation.

However, since I have indeed not investigated the history of CIA, that’s exactly why I’ve made only minimal statements about CIA history

Bullshit. You repeatedly compared my saying that the CIA was involved to far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories about secret Jewish cabals. That’s both a huge claim about CIA history, and it’s far more accusatory than anything I’ve said about you. You’re over here whining about “how every turn I’m attacking you” when the worst I’ve done is call you an annoying pedant because you’ve repeatedly attacked me over minor typos, while you’ve compared me to the fucking Nazis! And now you wanna play the victim? Do you really lack self-awareness to that degree?

Rest assured that my take away from this is not going to be “deep personal reflection on the carelessness that made me accidentally type a 3 instead of 6,” it’s that you’re an annoying pedant.

This is literally no “evidence”, you yourself said it just suggested a connection

If it suggests a connection, that’s synonymous with it being evidence.

and your meme straight-up says it was admitted.

Again, we’ve been over it, yes, my meme wasn’t 100% accurate, it was based on an existing meme.

couldn’t get the year of the revolution right

Your whole line of criticism is pedantic whining and after this I’m done entertaining it. Literally how many times have you brought up one simple typo, that was only off by three years anyway? Would you also bring it up this many times if I mixed up they’re and their? Maybe you would, if you’re that kind of annoying pedant, but if you ask me this nonsense has more to do with latching onto something, anything that you can use to punch left.

while simultaneously also making a statement on Hungarian history…

Just like you justified your lack of investigation into the CIA while also making statements about CIA history.

And in principle the discussion of whether something did or didn’t happen has little to do with whether one is a leftist or a liberal or anything else

It does matter if you try to enforce a hypocritical double standard where I have to be exactly right about everything and you don’t need to know basic historical facts.

What you expect, am I supposed to be utterly fascinated by your country’s history and read about it extensively just so that we all can be as enlightened as you are?

Yes, if fact, I do! The CIA had an extensive impact on the entire world, it’s the same way I have at least a general familiarity with the British Empire, even though I’m not from the UK, and that happened even further back.

Thank you for the recommendation. However, if we’re going to hurl stereotypes at each other instead of arguments, I can’t help but point out that I’ve seen numerous Lemmy leftists claim that NYT is a liberal propaganda rag. So idk if that’s actually a plus for Kinzer.

What an incredibly stupid line of argument. Ok, then go read fucking Grover Furr, for all I care. The point of recommending Kinzer (besides the fact that his work is good) is that he’s respected in the mainstream liberal sphere. Obviously, far-left authors like Furr (who I haven’t read and don’t recommend) or Michael Parenti (who I have read and do recommend) also talk about the CIA’s role in coups and color revolutions.

A very, very, very basic concept in evaluating information is to consider what the source is saying relative to the source’s bias. If an ancient history commissioned by a king talks about the king slaying a three lions at the same time with his bare hands, we should treat that claim with heavy skepticism. If that same work talks about the king having a big ol’ wart on his nose that everyone made fun of, that part’s probably true, because it goes against the author’s bias.

No source is perfect or without bias, and I’ll happily critique the NYT all day long, but when even someone who writes for them agrees with me, I’ll also cite them, because that’s all the more compelling.

What does this even mean? You brought it up as an analogy, I pointed out that the analogy has been picked to make your primary claim look more obvious and logical than it really is.

If you understood it was an analogy, then nitpicking that the date used in my analogy “wasn’t even in the same decade as my source” is utterly irrelevant.

If I believe that the Earth is flat, but then I have a dream where I see that the Earth is actually round, and then I start believing that it is round, does that mean I’m “correct”? Technically maybe yes but based on wrong information/reasoning

Except that my reasoning wasn’t wrong. I saw something that suggested there was a connection between the CIA and the uprising, and, based on my prior assumptions of how likey that was and how compelling I considered the evidence to be, I concluded that the connection was there. You jumped in to challenge that it wasn’t 100% proof, but also, there is other evidence that does prove it. So my process seems pretty reasonable.

It’s funny that you open the comment with, “What, do you randomly expect me to be so fascinated with your country’s history that I take a class on it?” while also criticizing me for not doing a thorough enough investigation into Hungary, a country I’m not from and have no connection to. If you’re a leftist, you have to be an expert on the history of the entire globe, as well as economics and all sorts of other fields. But if you’re a liberal, you can just go along with the status quo understanding nothing and everyone’s fine with it.

Government is a tool, and whoever is powerful enough can and will use that tool to pursue their interests. Yes, the government serves the rich under capitalism, but the problem is the power of the rich, not the tool. Throwing out the idea of government or limiting it is foolish because 1) it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and 2) if you’re in a position to limit the size of the government, you can just use it to do good things instead.

It’s incredible to me how ignorant people are of the CIA’s history, to the point of even calling into question whether they were engaged in these sorts of activities in general. This isn’t just me saying this or just some fringe group - it’s the accepted historical record. The proper propaganda line you’re supposed to use here is, “of course they did all those things in the past, but that was a long time ago and they’ve changed” (despite nobody ever being held accountable and nobody actually doing anything to change it). Deviating into straight up denialism just makes you look ignorant to anyone who’s actually informed about it.

If you want a detailed case study of how the CIA operated/operates, I recommend All The Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer, which details the 1953 Iranian coup. Kinzer is a respected journalist who’s contributed to the NYT and the Guardian.

Or we could look at different Wikipedia pages that detail the US’s involvement in coups and regime changes around the world, all of which will agree with me, that the CIA did these things pretty regularly. You’re the one who is deviating from the historical record accepted by actual historians.

This is a good comparison too - “in the 20’s”, you say, but the document you posted is not from the relevant decade, and is even from a different continent

Bruh. That was a separate hypothetical. You must be acting in bad faith.

Besides, even just ctrl+F’ing “CIA” in the Wikipedia article on the revolution shows that yes, CIA did emit materials that were meant to stoke the Hungarians’ desire for revolt. It’s literally on Wikipedia, it’s no CIA-hidden secret at all!

Great! So I’m right, it’s just like the meme. The only detail that’s in dispute is whether or not the document provides further evidence of involvement.

All libertarians want policies that will allow major corporations to walk all over them, whether they realize it and have a problem with it or not.

This is word for word the logic of right wing conspiracy theorists who ascribe every thing they don’t like to Jews.

Really? Can you name 5 world leaders who were overthrown by a secret Jewish cabal the way I can for the CIA, just off the top of my head? I think, maybe, there might be a little bit of a difference there.

This comparison is so fucking stupid that it ends up being antisemitic, because by equating the two you’re implying that this secret Jewish cabal both exists and has similar power and influence as the most powerful and well funded spy agency on the planet that has a very long and well documented history orchestrating coups and color revolutions and successfully covering up their involvement for decades, that also, you know, actually exists. Get a grip!

In court of law, an admission is pretty solid proof. Your meme says the involvement was admitted. I guess it wouldn’t look as convincing or funny if the meme said they admitted they funded some organisation outside of Hungary 7 years after the actual event

Yes, my meme made use of an existing meme and the phrasing of the original wasn’t 100% accurate. I apologize because my username and avatar seems to have caused some confusion, but this is actually an online meme community and not a court of law.

See, while trawling through these JFK files right wingers have already found a connection with Jews, as tenuous as it is, and tout it as solid proof it was them who had JFK killed, because after all we already know Jews are nefarious and evil, and clearly any weak connection to JFK’s death is good enough - of course (((they’ve))) scrubbed the proof, etc. so internet randos can go creative. Or maybe some higher standards for proof would be in order…

Again, the difference is I can point to countless times where that actually happened with the CIA and they can’t do that with Jews! I stg, it’s like, if I hear about a black person who was found strung up from a tree in the 20’s, I’m gonna go, “Huh, seems like it was probably white supremacists like the KKK” but apparently you’ll then chime in with “wElL hOw Do YoU nNoW iT wAsN’t AsIaN sUpReMaCiStS, hUh?” Because one of them is a real thing that actually existed at that time and place with significant power and a track record of doing that sort of thing repeatedly and getting away with it, and the other is a made up delusion.

This is not how any historical event can be meaningfully approached.

Isn’t it? If an organization exists that has the ability to cover up it’s involvement in things like this reliably and very rarely leaves behind hard evidence, and I’m a rando trying to piece together what happened 70 years later, then it seems like circumstantial evidence is the best I could reasonably expect to find. This isn’t a court of law where the standard is either, “100%, beyond any reasonable doubt, or they didn’t do it.”

This shows evidence of a connection - would it be enough to convict in a court of law? No. But, does it shape up to being more likely than not? Seems like it to me. Past precedent shows they could do it and get away with it, and we’ve got their fingerprints near it, so you can keep imagining that this Hungarian Freedom Fighters org connected to the CIA was, I don’t know, selling dinner plates or something, but I’m gonna connect point A to point B myself.

There was no uprising in Hungary in 1953. There was one in 1956

My mistake, I was going off memory and got the year mixed up with the year of Operation Ajax, the Iranian coup.

but it does not seem that this “Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation, Inc.” participated in it (I mean, an “Inc.” in socialist Hungary?).

Yes, I supposed the fact that the CIA was sponsoring a group called “Hungarian Freedom Fighters” does not definitively prove that it was it was in any way connected to partisan activity in Hungary, the way that CIA funded groups were doing all over the globe at this time. Maybe it was pure coincidence!

Well, that raises the question of whether we can we trust any documents released by the US in general. If the government killed JFK, would they really tell us, even this many years later?

That’s why it’s in quotes. Things are treated as conspiracy theories and you often sound like a crazy person bringing them up, even if what you’re saying is 100% factual.

Most of the documents we have were already partially declassified but with redacted parts. We now know more about JFK’s rift with the CIA and how the CIA was wiretapping the area Oswald was working and actively recruiting double agents from there.

Skeptics will continue to treat it as equally insane as saying the moon is made of cheese unless they see an official, released document saying, “Please kill the president for me, sincerely, Alan Dulles,” but there’s about as much evidence as a reasonable person would expect to find in a universe where it happened.

Doesn’t Hasan have a larger audience without doing that sort of thing?

Vaush’s whole thing is controversy bait. He purposely crosses lines to get people mad at him while maintaining some form of “plausible deniability” to where his fans can always find a way to defend and excuse his actions by talking about “you don’t understand the context” or whatever, it’s a very common and tiresome tactic. Like, if you’re trying to promote a shitty video game that can’t stand on it’s own merits, just do something to antagonize either the left or the right (doesn’t matter which) and then go to the other group and be like, “Look, the guys you hate hate us, you should check us out.” Controversy generates clicks. A big reason for Trump’s success is that he cracked the code on how to apply this formula to a political campaign. If you know how to recognize it, it’s very obvious that Vaush does this.

This sort of opportunism is very detrimental to actually understanding the world or promoting ideas or building a movement. It’s essentially brain-poisoning and a cognitohazard. You’re much better off reading actual books than just following whoever’s best at attracting attention on the internet. If you are going to shun books for videos, you should at least go with someone more educational, like Shaun.

We signed treaties with a government that was overthrown, and “signing a treaty” does not make a nation an ally. You seem to be the one confused about what an ally is. There was no formal alliance, just informal support, the same kind given to the people who you claim don’t count because they were never allies.

Ukraine was never an ally of the US either, by that metric.