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Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C.

It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil.

It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.

That feels a little horrifying to me.

> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.

They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.

this isn't 1820 -- most people's perception is via social media, and failing that, legacy media.

which is why the big tech bros and the openAI execs donated money to Trump; "kiss the ring".

it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.

recent posts show that 1/3 of the US electorate will still, in all likelihood, vote Republican, again, even after everything that has happened.

You're talking about that effective soft power, yes. There are some smarter authoritarians still maintaining it, but when things get overt it loses a lot of efficacy. We've swung from 1/2 to 1/3 support for Republicans, despite most people going about their lives more-or-less normally outside of one small city. So that swing is attributed to a failure of soft power. Check out opinions in Minneapolis to see what application of hard power looks like.

> it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.

I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.

How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy. as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him.

It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history.

What were getting is another Russia with the full military and economic might of the US.

A number that is soon to approach zero, everyone hopes.

It could happen. The world is dedollarizing as a direct consequence of the trade war.

and a demonstrated willingness to use it -- e.g. Venezuela

> It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world.

I realize this is kind of a joke, but...

The US will continue to be the most powerful military in history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom and power to push back on the president's worst impulses.

Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to put much of a dent in our current military spending (which they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia...

On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-WW II world order.

On the current Trump path the world is going to get far more dangerous and chaotic, not less.

What happens if the US economy collapses and it can't muster the equivalent of 1.5 trillion of today's dollars at any price?

We may find out.

But I'm pretty certain that outcome also wouldn't be a net positive for the rest of the world in the short or medium term. Very little of the rest of the world is insulated from the US economy.

What's really fun is that conventional weapons can protect you from a crazy aggressor if you're strong enough, but nuclear weapons may not. They only act as a deterrent, so they require your enemy to believe you'll use them, believe that they can't destroy all of them before you use them, and understand the horrible consequences of retaliation.

I get the impression that Trump is pretty negative on nuclear weapons and I don't think he'd do something that could provoke nuclear retaliation. But I doubt he'll be our last mad king. I think the odds are pretty high of at least a small nuclear war within my lifetime. Even if the US keeps it together, proliferation means much higher odds of some idiot leader somewhere pressing the Button.

> How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"?

Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)

What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? All the reports from people who knew him personally had very low regard for his intellegence, and that is even before taking into account his repeated public blunders.

> What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life?

The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.)

Did he manoeuvre himself, or did some other guy manoeuvre him so that guy could stay relatively hidden?

My assumption was that he didn't even intend to win the 2016 election but the ability to launder dark money is so appealing that his avarice combined with the sheer unlikability of HRC to create a perfect storm to blow him out of Florida.

That's certainly closer to my understanding of the guy. He really doesn't feel "smart" in any of the usual sense of the term.

It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world.

Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime".

Yeah, that -screams- competence.

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart.

I'll grant that he has achieved success via some amount of cunning (often via threats), but "smart" is decidedly not a term I would ever apply to him, and I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably think this given the myriad facts otherwise.

Donald Trump is cunning, but you wouldn't make a Fox president either, it would just screech and shit all over the oval office too.

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart.

wut. this is a joke, right?

Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools.

> wut. this is a joke, right?

No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists.

I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.

> recall the Republican debates

From literally a decade ago?

The bumbling dope is the default go-to characterization by the left, they always target intelligence first no matter what.

Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.

The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that.

How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction.

I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly, dude was wrong and/or lying about a lot of stuff but he wasn't dumb), and Trump, sure.

The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.

A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't understand why those norms are in place.

I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.

At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":

he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.

In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.

And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.

Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.

Bill Clinton who got caught in a sex scandal... smart?

And Noam Chomsky was deeply connected to JE and his island, which is a significantly larger scandal.

The point is that intelligence is orthogonal to, say, lust or many other trappings of power.

The wicked smart people are the ones who created and honed the right/left divide in the US. Trump is an avatar of one extreme that manipulated people wanted.

> Donald Trump is wickedly smart

This is the exact opposite of what has been said about Trump by his "friends" in the Epstein files.

His "friends" like Reid Hoffman and Epstein himself? They do talk about Trump a lot in those files.

There's about half a dozen or more comments about Trump's lack of intelligence or inability to focus from Epstein, Bannon, etc.

ah yes, a wickedly smart man who appoints an idiot as secretary of defense. completely consistent analysis here

I frequently see people saying that Trump is great, but he's let down by those around him. As if he didn't put them all there.

In any case, all you have to do is listen to the man talk. If you can hit stop before your brains start leaking onto the floor, the conclusion is inescapable.

For most of his life he did nothing that would require any sort of smarts. Becoming POTUS was quite an accomplishment, but he lucked into it. He happened to have a style and set of opinions that appealed to a large group of voters. He's charismatic in an empty sort of way that still works on a lot of people. He had a pretty pathetic set of opponents both in the primaries and the general. And he just barely won. Nothing in his campaign was shrewdly designed, he was just doing what he does, and it happened to work.

Birth him into an ordinary family instead of a rich one and he's going to be a used car salesman griping about getting bumped into the next tax bracket when he makes too many sales.

People—especially the squares in this business—tend to mistake his unfamiliar blue-collar New Yorker manner of speech at face value and don't bother to look deeper.

Or they look deeper and note that the folksy bragging about pretty basic and irrelevant misunderstandings continues into the minutes of meetings his base that laps that stuff up doesn't bother paying attention to, where there isn't any strategic value to dissembling or being mildly irritating to the apolitical CEOs he's supposed to be giving bland assurances to, and conclude the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes. There are, of course, smart and well connected people that want someone whose extraordinary talent is being the centre of attention occupying the centre of attention.

We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well.

I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try and flip me :D

But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.

They will have machines do that for them, curating collections of dissident files that are categorized by various propensities, then proposing among a range of soft to hard interventions. This is why we're seeing an uptick in the construction of AI data centers (e.g. STARGATE); it's going to get ugly very soon. And before you know it, your social mobility will be dictated by how well you adapt to the narratives they endorse. The fact that they (i.e., the elites) have gotten away with so much depravity, and are now revealing it publicly, emboldens them further to commit the type of oppression that I foresee happening. What we're experiencing now is ritual humiliation at scale.

I mean, they mostly are just picking folks up off the streets cause the folks are brown or have an accent.

I am not sure that even if they could minority report their way into killing off all the future Fred Hamptons, they have either the man power to do it or the mental ability to define an ontology for their little scrye to even tell them who they -should- target.

It is easy to confuse these folks with the mostly competent neoliberal technocrats they replaced, but that's the whole point of this thread, no? Patel and Bongino were more interested in how to win twitter points after Kirk was killed than, like, going and playing g-man, after all.

Also, one of the nice things about living in a panopticon is that it gives the folks running it the idea that they actually know what's going on. I'll take the long bet on the over-confidence and under-competence of these WWF wrestlers.

Project Insight. Hydra was growing inside S.H.I.E.L.D the entire time!

Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species didn't analyze the patterns of extinction.The evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights. Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might makes right" is rife with literary folly.

Book 1 of Plato: Republic demonstrates the folly of such thinking.

> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.

Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum.

But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.)

Shouldn't the DEA be the weakest agency? Now that the drug problem requires the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the War Department, and the U.S. military, shouldn't the DEA be shut down?

One can view the defensive realist perspective as another application of the 80/20 rule. It’s all economics. Debt determines many outcomes.

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It’s the incompetence and low-intelligence of our leaders that scares me most. We need actual clever people in office coming up with decentralized systems that work rather than the mentally deficient demagogues and liars coasting along collecting rent. Californian independence is the best way forward for us.

Facts are the enemy.

I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.

FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S.

They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.

I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing.

I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks.

Can you describe the basis for the claim?

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Dig deeper. Orwell was a child of the empire, born in Bengal and served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. His service affected him deeply.

He wrote of it, and in some ways his writing on those times is better than his fiction.

Its definitely an element, but it also mirrors some experiences in spain and ripping off Zamyatin's "We".

Like if you take Zamyatin's "We", and make the main character a propagandist working for the government, you get 1984.

The idea 1984 is about Russia would have surprised people at the time. That’s an ironic twist of history Orwell could have written about himself.

Maybe they are getting 1984 confused with animal farm?

The recent HN front-page post linked to Asimov's review of 1984—Asimov claimed it was Stalinism through and through (writing the review in 1980, FWIW).

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So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact.

Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1]

If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true.

Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on.

The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support

[1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )

If I wanted to know what ChatGPT says, I’m more than capable of asking it myself thank you.

I don't think anyone minds if you use an LLM to try to track down information like this. But the LLM's output is not what we want. That's merely a clue for you on your quest to find a proper source.

Even school children in the 90s were told that "the search engine" was ludicrous to give as a source. You should know that your LLM is the same.

Those events and times inspired those books, but they didn't actually happen in those countries.

There is a core message about the nature of not just ingsoc but the other governments of the world as well, and their relationship with each that gets left out when talking about 1984. The overbearing surveillance capital state is all people think about, that's part of it, but why that state exists, the motivations of it's leadership, the sheer and terrifying brilliance of the architecture of their government. in many ways, I'm glad the leaders of major countries and political movements don't grasp 1984 well (or at all).

But I agree that in 1948, Orwell's frustration and experience was not just that there was a world war, but that it was the second one in his life time. War-time mentality does approximate the levels of repression he mentions in the book, but in any country, it doesn't quite get there. But it could!

That's the scary part, things like "facecrime" weren't possible in 1984, now not only is it possible, it can be done without humans being involved too much. We have all the surveillance, more than he could have even imagined. But not only that, we have the means to analyze all the surveillance data in real time and do something about it. The capability to implement a world much worse than the one in 1984 exists. The villains of our times and the people they rule over just haven't managed to negotiate the imagination and sophistication of a strategy to abuse it yet.

EDIT: Coincidentally, I just stumbled on this timely piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62rexy9y3no

This is what I mean. just random people are doing the spying parts already. [SPOILER] a very similar scene is in 1984, except with the government behind the cams.

Thank you for inspiring me to look up the sources for the literary motifs in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Sources_f...

A very interesting read, but it did not verify any of your claims.

https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/

While it’s true that the day-to-day misery and bureaucratic absurdity of 1984 were heavily shaped by Orwell's time at the BBC, he primarily wrote the novel as a cautionary warning against the rise of totalitarianism and the dangers of a centralized, surveilled state.

Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.

Eh, orwell got his fare share of socialisation with socialism in spain and became a ardent anti-communist (more anti-totalitarian after seeing what this "experiment was all about" when it betrayed the anarchists).

Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist experiment and the societies it would form. The history rewritting was actually a typical socialist society pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70 years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from taiwan!

Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the moscow controlled part of the international defending facists as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the anarchists in the back in spain.

The Spanish civil war turned him into a socialist. His anti-stalin/anti-Soviet streak was in no way anti-communist. perhaps you shouldn't be so weasel-y with your wording.

Nope. He was unapologetically socialist before his involvement in the Civil War, and that conflict actually did make him anti-communist, and an anti-authoritarian. Socialism of the kind Orwell supported and communism of the kind we have seen in the world are two very different things.

For those reading who are curious on which comment is accurate, I would encourage you to read up on it to confirm for yourself. It's a highly fascinating subject to read about.

Another thing the Spanish Civil War did make Orwell was a hardcore realist.

"Half a loaf of bread is better than no loaf."

june 1937, in a letter to Cyril Connolly, written in Barcelona during the Civil War;

>‘I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.’

He was a libertarian socialist at various points, sure, but you're painting him as something he wasn't. He was avowedly a socialist throughout most of his adult life even if he wasn't playing patty-cake with the Trots and the MLs and various other 20th century Euro-centric leftist revolutionary groups

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)

Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.

It’s a shame we don’t have physical bodies and a means to share the human experience with other humans without intermediaries.

What's your plan, be present at all major events?

Well, I am God, so yes.

My original comment was just a counterpoint to the doom in parent: not all is lost, and in fact, quite a lot is not.

The situation of “things we care about are far away and require intermediaries to connect with” and “our ability to trust intermediaries is gone” are both human creations, and totally addressable.

Edits: more words, and wording

Already happened, my friend

Wild. Growing up through Reagan, I saw the world only act like this.

Apple's 1984 commercial didn't age well: https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc

Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism.

To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.

Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.

> To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.

Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.

Religion = blind loyalty (to those in power of said religion)

It's one of the oldest tools we have to control society. And it gets abused. All. Of. The. Time.

That's better, but it's still wrong, because there are plenty of organized belief systems whose leaders don't demand blind loyalty. To say that these don't qualify as religions is absurd.

You could say that one of the elements of religion is having faith in something that is not provable via the scientific method and I'd agree. But then you'd lose generals, managers, politicians, etc... from the list above in which case the comment has lost its meaning.

"Do what we say or lose your income" does require blind faith in the correctness of the hierarchy. The business model and whether or not useful work is being done or if the biological is just shuffling capital around as political rules allow.

It requires ignoring management is just another random person, wielding fiat authority. Physics has not imbued them with special properties. It's allegiance to made up semantics.

> "Do what we say or lose your income" does require blind faith in the correctness of the hierarchy.

That just describes anyone who worked under management. Recognizing that you may be fired for disobeying orders != believing that your manager is physically special.

How do you define blind faith and informed faith? Can't you conceive of someone who follows orders without blindly believing in them?

You seem to have this caricature of an XSXJ in your mind but your definition is so broad it lumps the majority of the world into it, and that's what I'm calling you out on.

What obligation do I have to satisfy your sensibilities?

I have no obligation to contribute to your food or healthcare. Why care how you feel about my rhetoric?

You! Of all people! ...can "call me out" all you want.

I'd actually go a step further: even science and scientific method require a sort of "faith" that the underlying assumptions (axioms of formal logic and algebra at the very least) are true.

The core difference is that science invites questioning those unprovable assumptions, whereas religion usually does not (and sometimes forbids it as part of the canon).

better word is dogma

> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.

I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will be able to talk back to!

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?

BNW has proven to be far more prescient, and insidiously so, than 1984

Yeah, that and Atlas Shrugged, but mentioning that book is a magnet for dissention.

Edit: I was correct, and I don't understand why. Was AS somehow twisted for political reasons? It's a great book.

Atlas Shrugged (and the fountainhead) is like a superhero comic book where the almighty good guys fight the flat, faceless "bad guys" with pure and fully justified moral righteousness. The "bad guys" are a slobbering caricature of a boogeyman that everyone can easily despise - wanting to do nothing except take from others like a bridge troll or a grey goo disaster scenario.

Nothing wrong with that I suppose but the second someone implies it has something to say about real life capitalists or social welfare or anything else then it gets weird; that makes as much sense as any of the marvel movies helping you decide how to vote for exactly the same reason.

I expect it's for this reason you're being downvoted - these books are often used as a motte and baily to imply something about real life (or often to ironically excuse their own selfish/bad behavior) and they just don't hold up for that in my opinion.

Probably because the author was an insufferable person and that that very book was part of the basis for (not "twisted") her inhumane and pretentious pseudo-philosophical spin on libertarianism?

I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.

Huxley was plenty prescient. Soma is basically scrolling for dopamine hits and distraction.

Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former personal secretary, said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do such things".

I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step toward dystopia... 10/10

It could be as simple as budget changes.

I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia.

I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true

source or evidence of this?

It's broadly reported that lawyers often depend on it in asylum cases as "a trusted, objective source for country conditions."

If you want an official government source to outright say "it was inconveniencing our mass deportation efforts," I don't know what to tell you.

Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this could easily be published by any public institution interested in foreign affairs.

If the CIA published this for the first time this year, no one would want it.

Why is valued if it is removed?

I had the opposite reaction to you.

I read the Handmaid's Tale and my first thought after finishing it was "Oh wow, this might actually happen here!"

But these are publications written by the CIA. Factbook was a name given to the book by the CIA, nobody is banning facts, that's just what they called it. It presumably just doesn't make sense anymore for the CIA maintain an encyclopedia, and I'm surprised they haven't sunset the program sooner.

Did we read the same book? Wasn't Winston fixing historical records? Sure he just directly rewrote them, but that's not a job. A job makes it look like you aren't fudging the numbers. But the result is the same.

The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook.

That's because it's a tool of propaganda. It's not suitable for the current restructuring so they got rid of it.

One only believe it's useful insofar as the people in power reward you for believing it. Regardless of what you believe for example writing the word stable next to a country doesn't make it so. It's a common misconception people have about religion.

There is always a tradeoff. For the utility gained by the factbook you carry increasing cognitive dissonance. You are stuck in a system radically reinterpreting labels, becoming increasingly brittle and cruel.

It was certainly one perspective that was valuable to have: I imagine everybody understood that it was by CIA (it was in the name!) with everything that implies even with "fact" in the name.

There were still actual facts in there, and when there was controversial stuff, you knew that it was coming in with US-tinted glasses, so if that supported with any claim an "adversarial" point, you could trust it to be true (eg. if it confirmed rising GDP and per-capita increase for China and matched Chinese figures, you'd be fine trusting it).

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This drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.

I think it’s satire, not sarcasm. Mocking sycophant but ultimately hollow AIs, by imitating them. And, in the end, concurring with GP. Highlighting both the ways in which GP is correct, and filling in the gaps in implementation between the originally proposed dystopia, and the one we actively find ourselves marching towards.

Upvote from me :)

> While the parent comment is low quality

I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.

Forgive me, my bar is high, but I tend to agree with you. I didn’t have a good way to indicate that I find value in a small number of comments like these without potentially undermining my greater desire to avoid toxic comments here.

Your back-seat moderation is annoying and contributes to the wank of the site, too.

I'll second here. While not profound, I found myself nodding, involuntarily, in agreement.

I used the CIA factbook so much in college in the early 2000's when looking at so many things. When researching countries to support and travel to it made sense to vreview it beforehand. Its insane that this as a resource would be taken down.

It gets cited a lot in immigration litigation as well (eg in asylum arguments) because it's an unimpeachable factual source that the government's lawyers can't reasonably dispute.

Now that you mention it, I'm pretty convinced this is the reason they took it down. If you can't dispute the facts, get rid of them, I guess.

And that's not necessarily anti-intellectual or in opposition to truth. When "seeing like a state", a government doesn't have a view of most actual facts, like "was this person actually in danger" or "is this person repeating the exact same story as the ten people before them". It only knows facts legitimated by its own systems. When those facts force it to take actions that are harmful and dumb, the government is wise to stop defining those as facts.

For example, if the army keeps launching raids that kill civilians because the government can only track progress through body counts, it is not "facts are the enemy" to stop counting the bodies. (Obviously it would be wiser to stop using the counts as the deciding factor, but if the generals have different values than the government, as immigration courts do, then stopping the count is the only way to stop the bleeding.)

that is almost certainly the point

In what ways would you use it like that? Honest question, I'm not at all familiar with what was in it.

It was a great resource for basic facts about countries. Providing it to the public was genius in addition to being useful.

I was in middle school in the 90s and I had that URL memorized. Used it a lot as a reference for class projects.

One consequence: The World Factbook is often used in immigration applications as a "you won't get hassled" source of information about conflicts, involvement with the military, etc. (The same is true about State Department assessments of human rights violations.)

This is surely just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in the CIA at the moment. Senator Ron Wyden just sent a mysterious public letter about concerns about what they are doing.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5724300-ron-wyden-cia-le...

Whenever there's a mystery, apply the scientific method to investigate it. Form a hypothesis, an experiment or test , then record the results and check if they support.

Hypothesis: CIA is hacking reporters to determine their government sources.

If we start seeing more government sources exposed, we haven't proven it but it supports the hypothesis.

Hypothesis: State election systems are being compromised for federal monitoring and control.

If we start seeing more improbable results in one direction, that is support for the hypothesis.

> apply the scientific method to investigate it.

Great where do I find a spare identical copy of the CIA to use as the control group?

The CIA's primary remit is outside of their own country. If the CIA is turning their focus inward, that's actually good news for the remainder of the civilized world.

There's this from 2022, but there are probably many concerns from Wyden:

https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-hei...

What is going on?

This will not/hardly save any money. And this was a source of US soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them, etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)

The facts are inconvenient. Immigrants were citing them at deportation hearings, and the government couldn't dispute them because they came from the government.

This administration doesn't seem to see value in soft power.

Alternatively, they dont like to be fact-checked. One of donalds favorite activities is denying he ever said/did things he is recorded on video as saying/doing.

This is so messed up. This was a great public benefit. We used it in High School, including Model United Nations.

used it extensively in high school as a more approachable way to learn about countries without the daunting amounts that wikipedia pages tend to have.

come to realise down the line the "writer's biases" in the latter half of the articles. almost comical to see how nuanced situations are distilled down to "our perspective". recall how you could "learn" about the drug trade situation in almost any country, regardless of how you perceived the country's safeness before reading the page.

Really don't like this engagement-bait style "suddenly stops" / "have quietly" and all this stuff. It's no wonder it works. The headline from the CIA is far more staid and off the front page in comparison https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794

It's not even a bad submission saying that he mirrored it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/

Is it engagement-bait to say that they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives if they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives?

Ha, yep. I recall a similar observation in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251912

What other engagement bait adverbs appear in HN submission titles?

How did the word "suddenly" get into the title?

That was editorializing by the person who submitted it, I didn't use that language in my post.

I agree with you

There was a website redesign under the Biden administration that lost a lot of important historical information as well. For example, the CIA in-house historian had a book review about the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government in Iran in the 50s, and the CIA/MI6 role in that coup.

I wonder how much AI scraping traffic the site was getting...

I hope that we will eventually find out why it was shut down.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794

Thanks! Expanded:

Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 - 126 comments, Feb 2026

I know this isn’t a popular opinion, and yeah, I will also miss it, but I’ve always thought the World Factbook was a strange thing for the CIA to be publishing in the first place.

Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)

That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.

It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever.

The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral.

Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda.

During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there.

However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.

World Factbook is targeting US government itself providing a consistent and open view on the topic - a single official position on basic facts.

Alternatively, an intelligence agency might publish what they want you to think they know, or simply what they want you to think.

Truth is a danger for the ruling oligarchy.

The irony of an intelligence agency publishing a "fact book" in the first place is thick.

Why? It's an excellent recruiting tool. I used to read it as a kid (along with every other paper or digital encyclopedia I could get my hands on), and it certainly made me interested in the CIA.

Why?

Because intelligence agencies generally have a vested interest in spreading subtle propaganda, such as by distorting facts.

Now, I have yet to see any cases of the CIA doing this to the World Factbook, since that would tank its credibility, but I also don't browse the Factbook too often.

You are looking at the trees, and missing the forest. The subtle propaganda that the Factbook exists to spread is “the CIA is a neutral and trustworthy gatherer and purveyor of facts”.

I think that’s a secondary or even tertiary goal. The primary goal is to provide a public service to public and private parties who want to become better informed and to show the American people that their tax dollars are at work and reduce the risk of having their funding get cut.

The part before the “and” is the how of the propaganda I described, the part after the “and” is one of the outcomes the propaganda is intended to influence; neither is an alternative to the propaganda function.

I think the problem is people are acting like propaganda is inherently bad, so this subconsciously comes across as “the CIA is problematic because they have a source of factlettes for people to peruse”.

They have multiple competing interests. One of their interests is telling the truth to their local military and politicians - getting caught in a lie to their side is the worst that could happen to them.

The world factbook was mostly things that the military or politicians might care about the truth of, and data they need anyway. Mostly what is there were things where there wouldn't be much value in spreading lies - and what value that might have is outweighed by you can fact check everything (with a lot of work) so lies are likely to be caught.

Not saying they are perfect, but this isn't a place where I would expect they would see distorting facts help them.

> One of their interests is telling the truth to their local military and politicians - getting caught in a lie to their side is the worst that could happen to them.

It's definitely not the worst that can happen. Happens fairly often - google: CIA lying to congress. Getting audited is the worst that thing that happens to the CIA. ie The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last actively audited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1960s, specifically discontinuing such work around 1962.

The worst that can happen is congress gets interested in a way that cuts their budget. An audit is one potential step on that path.

Fair

I wrote about one such case in another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901003

I remember a few amusing examples which weren't strictly inaccurate but were pretty blatant official lines, like how the US uniquely got to stress a "strong democratic tradition" as its political system, whereas everywhere else in the Western world was just "parliamentary democracy" or "constitutional monarchy" and at least the Cold War era versions had a "Communists" line item which purported to identify how few people in democratic societies were members of Communist parties...

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It was updated weekly. Constantly writing and maintaining so much information is almost certainly very expensive. Coupled with the fact that you have to be very careful before releasing each edit to make sure that no accidental personal beliefs or theories slip by (as that would be a diplomatic catastrophe), I reckon the cost of maintaining the thing could be very high.

I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about.

Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.

Your definition of "very high" costs likely don't align with what you think of when you think of "very high" government spending. NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.4% of the total government budget.

Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.

> NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.04% of the total government budget.

I'm sorry, I think you have a math or data error here. The US government budget for 2025 was not $62.5 trillion dollars.

Yea, they where off by a factor of 10, so 0.4%.

Now fixed. Point still stands!

If it was about the cost of updating it, they wouldn't need to remove the archived versions.

yeah, where is the CIA going to find the money to pay a few editors?

I think you touched on the real reason: objective facts are anti-trump, woke leftist propaganda

What makes you think they can't "keep it going"? They're ceasing the publication, aka, the act of releasing it.

From the CIA Factbook History page it writes,

> It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook

Is it just being classified again? Who knows! That could be classified.

$100,000,000,000 budget for ICE in a year. Average $400,000,000,000 a year in tax cuts for the wealthy. Those expenditures don't pay for themselves. Gotta cut useful services, medical care for the working class, and devalue the dollar some.

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Wikipedia next? I hope not.

is wikipedia directly owned by the US Government?

No, but neither is Greenland.

Counter-argument: why are my tax dollars replicating Wikipedia?

What do you think Wiki is based on?