Petrol posted:

dsblogovi1 posted:

Sometimes you just have to take some chances and move forward to achieving your goals. Incredibly interesting in here indeed. thanks for the share.
69 weeks ago

the perfect comedic week hour hath struck

blinkandwheeze posted:

Petrol posted:

They don't care about wacky libertarians because their ideology does not actually pose a real threat to the state.

stego was talking about a potential socialist state prosecuting libertarians to the same degree capitalist states persecute socialists currently tho? he's not actually suggesting current intelligence agencies care about libertarians

Sure. Well, I was just elaborating why they don't and won't.

Taking up the hypothetical though, I would first suggest that libertarians of the kind now prevalent would not really exist in a socialist state. They are very clearly a symptom of late capitalism - the direct product of a capitalist program to consolidate power in a time of growing discontent and instability. Regardless, a socialist state, like any state, would need to maintain some kind of security service to mitigate capitalist threats to its existence. Ideally this would mean not the persecution of anyone for expressing ideas as such, nor for organising, but the policing of external influence in particular. It's pretty much a given that any serious threat to a socialist state would be driven by international capital. I find it very hard to imagine a situation where that would not be the case.

Petrol posted:

They don't care about islamists because they pose no real threat to any western state.

i dont think this is true, unless all of the people in gitmo and the rest of the cia black sites are secretly communists

c_man posted:

Petrol posted:

They don't care about islamists because they pose no real threat to any western state.

i dont think this is true, unless all of the people in gitmo and the rest of the cia black sites are secretly communists

Gitmo is mostly full of peasants who never posed a political threat to anyone. In fact, by now most of the genuine islamists have either been released in things like prisoner swaps, or in a couple of cases are being kept in extremely drawn out show trials. But you make an excellent point, which is that CIA has gone to incredible lengths to torture and assassinate islamists since 9/11. Not all of them though. There are notable exceptions, in fact. Like, they killed that American fella, and almost immediately afterward his teenage son, but Zawahiri is still out there somewhere? Are they really serious about stamping out AQ et al, or is it more about tidying up the loose ends that are no longer useful in one way or another? I'm not even saying someone like Zawahiri is a knowing asset or anything like that. But these people ARE watched closely and they're able to get up to all sorts of mischief but only in non-western countries. Even if their US hit rate turned out to be, like, a couple of skyscrapers every 15-20 years perhaps, that's not a serious threat to the existence of the state.