I hope the amount of incorrect, ranting assumptions you've made about me and what you think I stand for made you feel better.

Perhaps you shouldn't be blamed, but your role in the institution is clear: you help rationalize death and violence for those in pursuit of power. There are lower callings, but not many.

Do you believe that the world and humanity would be better off if the US hadn't existed after, say, WWII? Not just from a geopolitical perspective, but from perspectives of technology, medicine, and similar? Do you believe that someone like, say, China, or an amalgamation of warring mideast states, or perhaps even an old Soviet superstate would be a better global steward than the United States and the West?

The mid-east states started warring after we and our allies divided them up after WWI and purposefully separated tribal groups by state lines, and then started stealing all of their resources. China has not stepped outside of its borders in quite some time, but I understand if you're afraid of the Asiatics. 19th Century ignorance is about where I'd place your philosophical aspirations.

As for Russia, I find that simply ironic. Who was it who was invading Afghanistan to impose secular values on a fundamentalist culture, but couldn't get things done because weapons and arms were being smuggled in through Pakistan? Do I prefer the massacres in the eastern bloc to the death squads in Central America? Do I prefer the assassinations of civil rights leaders with the FBI or the KGB? How is Estonia doing vs Haiti? Latvia vs Ecuador? Poland vs Nicaragua? Was Saddam a great ally in the 1980s when we sponsored a million deaths after Iran threw out our puppet government, or was Mubarak a better investment (until recently, at least)?

Did our investment in China go up or down after they rolled over students in Tiananmen Square? What made us turn on Gaddafi after showering him with diplomatic gifts in 2008?

Do women have more rights in Saudi Arabia or Iran, and if the answer is Iran, why are we allies with Saudi Arabia?

Only a fool can see the American empire as anything than what it is: a run-of-the-mill, self-interested machine of conquest and violence. Not better or worse than any other empire, but like all empires, interested in a single question: do you obey?

If you want to defend that mentality, there's no difference between yourself an any other parasite of any other empire. You wave the stars and stripes because of your coincidental birthplace, not because it represents a value system. You're a self-righteous parasite. There's nothing special about you or about America. Not anymore.

PS: I didn't even touch the slaughter in Southeast Asia. That would have made the argument too easy.

Most of the commenters here will twist this story into how the US is somehow evil, and drone on (pun intended) about how the US and West governments and/or corporations and/or political systems are what's wrong with the world, when in reality, people are suffering and dying under actual tyranny and oppression.

Like in Syria.

You are absolutely right, and absolutely wrong.

In December of 2001, U.S. agents arranged to have a German citizen flown to a Syrian jail called the Palestine Branch, renowned for its use of torture, and later offered to pass written questions to Syrian interrogators to pose to the prisoner, according to a secret German intelligence report shown to TIME on Wednesday. The report is described in the new book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by British investigative journalist Stephen Grey. The complex arrangement was part of the CIA's sprawling practice of extraordinary renditions, the secret transfer of terror suspects to hidden prisons across the world -- which has involved the aid of numerous foreign governments and the knowledge of key Western European allies, according to the book, which was shown to TIME by the author. After U.S. officials long refused to confirm the CIA's secret detention of terror suspects abroad, President Bush last month admitted that terror suspects had been transferred abroad to secret CIA facilities, but U.S. officials continue to deny that such prisoners have been tortured, saying that foreign governments assured them that they would be treated fairly.

Inside the CIA's Secret Prisons Program, Time Magazine, 2006

And before you backpedal on what happened to Maher Arar:

This week the Supreme Court denied, without comment, the appeal of Maher Arar, a dual citizen of Canada and Syria who was arrested in transit through JFK airport in 2002, then shipped off to Syria and tortured for 10 months. Arar's abuse allegedly included repeated beatings with electrical cables and confinement in a cell the size of a grave. When they realized they had the wrong guy -- the really, totally, and utterly innocent guy -- Arar was released without charges. He was then completely exonerated of any link to terror by the Canadian government, which impaneled a commission to investigate the incident, issued a 1,000-plus-page report on the matter, held its own intelligence forces responsible for their role in the screw-up, then apologized and paid Arar $9.8 million. Whereas the U.S. government -- as Glenn Greenwald observes -- has never apologized, never acknowledged any wrongdoing, never held anyone responsible, and, on President Barack Obama's watch, has only redoubled its efforts to prevent Arar from having even a single day in court.

So, we took an innocent man, illegally shipped him off to Syria (probably in exchange for easing off pressure on the Assad regime), tortured him, and now we're denying him his day in court to hold our government to account. Stop pretending that you, or the American government, has any principled position on matters of human rights. Syrian torture facilities are just dandy when we want to use them. The fact is that we have put more bodies in the ground this decade than the Assad regime has in it's entire family history.

That's why you focus on Assange, instead of dealing with what his organization has revealed. The truth isn't important to you. Protecting American state power is. Oddly enough, the American government keeps telling me that they're free to subpoena everything about me and my life, and that I should have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide, and now we're saying the same thing. Why is the American government so afraid of the truth?

As a huge world power, they've got lots of little people like you, desperately clinging at the teat of the empire, ready to kill enough brown people to fill up football stadiums labeled "collateral damage" and "terrorism suspects" instead of what most of them probably are: "innocent civilians." They're not statistics, and they're not mistakes, they were human beings with families and hopes and a future, and they were all snuffed out because you and people like you would rather massacre a million people than let oil rich nations govern themselves. You'll send young Americans to die telling them it's for freedom, but really it's for the empire. It's for profit. It's for control over countries that don't want us there.

So fuck your lies, fuck your hypocrisy, fuck your deluded self righteousness, fuck your paranoid fascism, and fuck you. May you reap what you sow.

There are exceptions to every rule, but unfortunately, most people who have an MBA are interested only in making money. They "achieve" this goal through lies called marketing, through bullshit accounting tricks and technically legal loopholing called money management, through exploitation of the earth and it's people called maximizing revenue. If you'd read your literature, you'd know that pursuit of money has never been a noble goal, and it never will be. It's the desire of degenerate subhumans whose greatest gift to the world will be as compost.

As one artist put it, you're a poor man's Donald Trump, and you think that's worthy of praise? I'll trade one million MBAs for one Jonas Salk any day of the week. You may have fooled yourself into thinking that greed and gluttony need a graduate program, but no one else is that delusional.

Why do you think oil is cheaper than orange juice? It's because we demand cheap access, or we invade. Just read about the Pentagon flatly stating they will "not tolerate" Iran's alleged threats to close the Strait of Hormuz. Control over the region is also used as "veto power" in geopolitics.

If you don't think so, ask yourself why we have invaded Iraq a half dozen times in the 20th Century. It poses no threat to our national security, and has no resource other than oil. Why did we overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran and then divide their oil fields between BP and American oil companies. Then ask yourself why we consider Saudi Arabia an ally, even though they're beheading people for witchcraft and treat women like garbage, and make Iran look like a paradise in comparison. It's because they sell us oil and support our iron grip on the region, because it also serves their interests.

If you know of a nation we've invaded more times with more resources than Iraq, just name it and provide your sources.

Germany also has one of the highest ratios (approximately 20%) of renewable energy production precisely because they tax non-renewables and subsidize green energy. Germany is the exception, not the rule.

Huge government subsidies in the form of never-ending wars in the middle east and military technology investment have led to our dependence on fossil fuels... I'm not sure why you're against a similar method of weening ourselves off of them.

Governments last year gave $43 billion to $46 billion of support to renewable energy through tax credits, guaranteed electricity prices known as feed-in tariffs and alternative energy credits, the London-based research group said today in a statement. That compares with the $557 billion that the International Energy Agency last month said was spent to subsidize fossil fuels in 2008.

Source.

You were saying?

If you actually have evidence that someone did all that complex soil and sediment analysis in a specific field in Peru, please provide a link, as I will definitely include that in my museum of the least optimally spent money

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the dumbest motherfucker alive who is somehow capable of using a computer.

If you do not stand by to free man from the clutches of another man, you are by choice, the very type of person you so much despise

The real question would be, do you support China invading the United States if they think we aren't free? You're not even thinking about that, but that's alright. I had no reason to expect any real ideas from you.

There's a decent argument to be made that North Korea would be more like China if we hadn't invaded. That is another example of a decision made by people who thought they knew how to "fix" a political movement that threatened their interests by responding with extreme violence. The Korean war was fairly successful, especially compared to our similar invasions of Southeast Asia, half of Central and South America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, and the dozen other nations we've destroyed with our ignorance.

Keep cheering on the death and destruction and pretend it's for freedom. You're doing exactly what your owners expect you to do, and they didn't even have to ask for your fealty: you freely gave it to them, no questions asked. All they had to do is say some nice sounding words, and you handed over your pocketbook and your children's future without even thinking about it. Wave the flag. Close your eyes. Remember: you're a real American.

I'm firmly against empire and the destruction of national sovereignty. The question is: do you support worldwide state violence to keep the United States in power?

I don't care about your bullshit intellectualism. The 21st century is no place for eugenics or the dogmas surrounding original sin.

There's a difference between dissecting your reptilian ethics and your proposal for the continuation of worldwide violence that will kill us all if we can't adapt a different way of living.

I think your ideas are horrible and ignorant, but that doesn't mean I want to cause you bodily harm.

The nature of man. From a cultural aspect you can subdue it, but only for a limited time before it too becomes eroded and corrupted with our true genetic nature.

These are excuses fascists use to excuse their immorality and violence. You can fucking keep it for yourself.

And as nature has proven through evolution, only the strong survive to displace the meek.

Is that why dinosaurs are still around? The most adaptable survive. You're at the top of your food chain because you can think, use tools, plan ahead, and adapt to your environment beyond your genetic attachments, not because you're the strongest. You speak as if you've derived all of your thoughts from some uneducated Republican.

That's just like saying the world will always have institutional world-wide slavery, or witch-hunts, or colonialism. You can't evolve society if you base all of your decisions on the belief that we can't change.

Our behavior didn't change after communism failed.

The main difference between all of those countries doing wrong and the United States is that we do evil in other countries, and they do it within their own borders. That's doesn't make us better, it's just a reflection of our status as the world's only superpower and the relative health of our electoral system. We watched Syria and Egypt and Tunisia and Turkey murder for decades without saying much about it, because we found them useful. And back when we controlled Iran with a dictatorship, we shut down the free press just as we did after we invaded Iraq.

Hypocrisy is indeed what is wrong with the world. Grow the fuck up already.

Right, the Islamic Republic of Iran just wants to live their lives peacefully. And they do nothing bad.... like, sponsor Hezbollah or ship weapons or participate in kidnappings. Nope, if the US went away, everything would be right as rain in Iran. Right?

The Islamic Republic of Iran wouldn't exist without the US. Remember, we destroyed their democracy in 1953 because they were trying to nationalize their oil fields, and kick us out. British Petroleum began its life as Anglo-Iranian Oil, which was known as Anglo-Persian Oil before that. The company was literally founded on the outright theft of all of Iran's oil, along with a handful of American companies that got their cut after Operation Ajax was complete. We installed the Shah, he repressed and radicalized the population with our money and training, and then the people revolted, as they often do.

We helped Britain divide and administer their post-war winnings after WWII that largely has started all of this mess. (Do you think oil-rich Iraq was divided equally into Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni populations by accident?) We backed Saddam to punish the newly independent Iran after they overthrew our Shah. We participated in the proxy wars which destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran in the 80s. We allowed Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons -- as in, we certified them as nuclear free every year -- during the 80s in exchange for helping us smuggle weapons into Afghanistan. We backed Mubarak. We were pals with Gaddafi while he was torturing and murdering people because he was selling oil to us, but that was all the way back in 2009. We allow Turkey to murder and suppress Kurds at their whim because they are an ally. We didn't say much about Syria at first because it was one of our blacksites. We're still watching Bahrainis get murdered because we like the sitting government that allows our fleet that we use to project power into that Middle East to have a massive billion dollar operations base.

The US isn't the root of all evil, but in the modern Middle East, it's the root of most of it.