Over time people’s memories of Obama have been more nostalgia for the times rather than an honest assessment of his actions.

Hell, at this point I’ve seen people being kind of nostalgic even about Bush…

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

No it isn’t synonymous. Evidence is in principle unambiguous, whereas merely “suggesting” something could be more or less ambiguous. And I think that if you put down the raw facts on paper, i.e. described exactly what the document says, nobody could call that “evidence”, and some number of people would probably agree that it might be only a “suggestion”.

yes, my meme wasn’t 100% accurate

That heavily downplays its actual rhetorical effect. It’s not accurate, but it makes a big attention-grabbing dramatic statement. In other words, it’s in line with the usual methods of conspiracy theories based on bullshit reasoning.

Literally how many times have you brought up one simple typo

No more and no less than twice. Once in my very first comment, and second time in the previous comment. I mostly tried to ignore it, and I brought it up again to underline your general carelessness in treating of the issue. (And it’s not a typo, it’s a factual mistake, as you’ve said.)

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

There’s a few issues here. I haven’t simultaneously claimed to be a leftist and that leftists should be experts in world history and economics, while you did, so this contradiction is only your own. I don’t think I’m an expert on history and I’m afraid I never will be. However, since I have indeed not investigated the history of CIA, that’s exactly why I’ve made only minimal statements about CIA history, statements that should be correct regardless of various other information on its history. I said that: CIA supported some Hungarian dissidents in 1963 (as evidenced by the document in OP), and that CIA spread some radio programs in 1956 Hungary in order to stoke the revolt (as is widely accepted and found on Wikipedia). Everything else I wrote is conditionals based on reasonable assumptions and general knowledge that I am aware is not backed by more precise info on my part: yes, it seems perfectly reasonable that CIA has supported anti-communist movements (I haven’t read about that in any detail but I’ve heard of that happening and it seems to be widely agreed on, so I didn’t problematise it), and it could also be that it has done the same in 1956 Hungary (correct, as it has turned out).

This is simply intellectual carefulness. I’m not appealing to my expertise or wide knowledge, I’m appealing to reading the actual text carefully and extrapolating what can be reasonably extrapolated from it.

I have to be exactly right about everything

In your position, yes you kind of do (even you said: “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.” - high standards!). In general, I think everyone should strive to be maximally correct if they make a claim that hundreds of other people see and take for truth.

Try to approach this discussion with a bit more focus on the arguments and the actual words, and less on me and your own perspective in it. 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 to make our positions seem more symmetrical (you’re trying to argue about what CIA did or did not do, but I’m trying to argue about whether this counts as proof of what CIA did), and conveniently ignoring my key point even when I spell it out in bold letters. Do you find that I’ve done the same to you, have I ascribed you statements and ideas that you haven’t actually previously expressed? (Aside, of course, from the instance where I explicitly announced I would do it by ascribing you the position of those leftists who deride NYT, and in retrospect I shouldn’t have done that because it was nothing more than a pointless jab.) At the same time, you seem to be very emotionally invested in this, downvoting me even while absolutely nobody else is reading this dialogue anymore. Cool it down, you don’t have to respond to me, just please reflect on your own thinking/reasoning process once more, maybe sometime later when you have some distance from all this.

So you’ve at least silently dropped the accusation of my denial of CIA’s involvment in anything. Good, that’s some progress.

What an incredibly stupid line of argument.

Indeed, I did literally declare that it is based on stereotyping as a response to your making a stereotype out of me…

I saw something that suggested there was a connection between the CIA and the uprising

It sure might look like it if you ignore that the uprising happened 7 years earlier and that the organisation CIA supported wasn’t based in Hungary. But it looks like you ignored that while reading the document, so the connection seemed much stronger than it really is.

and how compelling I considered the evidence to be

This is literally no “evidence”, you yourself said it just suggested a connection, it isn’t even close to evidence of it, and your meme straight-up says it was admitted.

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.

That’s simply not the point I was going for, you’ve misread it or I should’ve been more clear. My point was this: your analogy used a time and place where the event is nigh impossible to be ascribed to any other entity than KKK and similar; on the other hand, the event of CIA supporting Hungarian dissidents that is described in the document did not happen in the time and place that is the focus of your theory.

but also, there is other evidence that does prove it. So my process seems pretty reasonable.

No, it is not even remotely reasonable to provide mere indications, weak proof, or non-proof, while you have easily available and already generally-accepted proof at your disposal.

criticizing me for not doing a thorough enough investigation into Hungary

Lol, “thorough investigation”, that’s not what I asked of you (again, my first comment: “Can’t you just Google one or two key words?”), you didn’t even check Wikipedia and couldn’t get the year of the revolution right, and, as I said above, made your whole conjecture while likely ignoring the actual content and context of the letter.

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 you’ve just justified your lack of investigation into the topic by saying that you don’t have any connection to Hungary, while simultaneously also making a statement on Hungarian 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. If I’m wrong about something, my politics matter fuck all, I’m simply wrong, and the actual facts will speak for themselves.

It’s incredible to me how ignorant people are of the CIA’s history

I’m not from the US and we didn’t have a class on CIA history. 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?

even calling into question whether they were engaged in these sorts of activities in general

You’re the one who is deviating from the historical record accepted by actual historians.

But I literally haven’t done that. If I have, show me the sentence where I did and I’ll absolutely take it back. You’re reading something into my comments that isn’t there - just like you’re reading events from 1963 US into 1956 Hungary.

The proper propaganda line you’re supposed to use here is

No, I’m not supposed to act like whatever stereotype/strawman you’re imagining in your head. You can fuck right off with this sort of “communication”.

Kinzer is a respected journalist who’s contributed to the NYT and the Guardian.

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.

Bruh. That was a separate hypothetical.

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.

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.

You might finally start to get it! You accused me of doubting CIA’s involvment even though I literally pointed out to you that there is different, solid evidence they were involved! Like how stupid of a CIA-involvment-denier would I have to be to do that? And yet you’re still failing to understand that this never was my main point anyway!

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!

In Croatian: palačinka (accentuated: palačínka, IPA: /palat͡ʃǐːŋka/, plural: palačínke). The origin is: Greek πλακοῦς (LS: “flat cake”), πλακόεντα > Latin placenta (OLD: “A kind of flat cake”) > Romanian plăcintă > Hungarian palacsinta > Austrian German Palatschinke > Croatian palačinka. As Croatia has spent much of its history as a part of Austria-Hungary, its culture has left a strong mark especially on the northern dialects and the culinary practices there.

Sources:

• R. Matasović, Etimološki rječnik hrvatskoga jezika

• PGW Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary

• Walde-Hofmann: Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch

• Liddel-Scott: Greek-English Lexicon

However, Croatian pancakes are very thin and bigger in surface than American ones. They’re made of batter, we usually fill them with jam and roll them up and eat like that (some other fillings are in use too, ofc). My sister sometimes buys herself some American pancakes, way thicker and covered in chocolate cream, and the rest of the family is always mildly horrified by them, lol. It’s pretty much two different dishes IMO. Palačinke would probably better correspond to crêpes, but we don’t have different words to distinguish American pancakes from crêpes…

Antisemitic conspiracy theorists would certainly be glad to send you extensive “evidence” that e.g. the Russian revolution was also supported by Jews, or various other political manipulations that they’ve supposedly carried out (why only limit it to toppling governments?). Now, as I’ve talked with these people enough times, I found it is impossible to spend days trying to check all the nonsense they may throw at me, and in general any discussion of any topic ever could be extended into eternity. What is perfectly reasonable is to abstract the individual case and figure out how it may plausibly be explained by itself. Antisemitic nonsense always fails here. In this case, so does your ascription of 1956 to CIA based on this particular document. The wider picture is different, as I’ve already said, it’s simply much more logical that CIA has supported anti-communist movements than that the antisemitic bullshit about the Jews is true. But if your standards are low enough to be convinced by a conjecture as weak as this one, that does lead me to worry about whether your general conviction on CIA’s actions is well-founded either.

I mean it is very obvious that you don’t want to inquire into this any further or discuss the contents and context of the document, I’ve simply checked Wikipedia on Kiraly and it looks like I’ve already done more research about it than you have. All you have are implications, you haven’t addressed the chronology, who was active where and when…

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”

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.

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! And if they were active that way, maybe they also funded some of the people and organisations in Hungary at the time? That doesn’t sound unreasonable to me as an otherwise uninformed person on the topic. But is that idea corroborated by this new document? No.

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

Have you actually tried to piece it together, though? Have you at the very least googled who these people are, what sort of plausible chronology could be reconstructed, anything? Have you noticed that Kiraly, who was involved in the 1956 revolution and subsequently left the country, lived in US at the time of the letter (1963)? Is it not worthy of considering that the HFFF Inc. was based in the US and was founded by Kiraly and similar Hungarians in exile?

There are people with the exact same resources as you, i.e. the internet, already discussing this seriously and digging for more info and trying to figure out what can be reasonably concluded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AHungarian_Revolution_of_1956#JFK_files

This isn’t a court of law where the standard is either, “100%, beyond any reasonable doubt, or they didn’t do it.”

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.

you can keep imagining that this Hungarian Freedom Fighters org connected to the CIA was, I don’t know, selling dinner plates or something

Your arguments are growing thin. Your narrative is actually made up of vague connections with a 7-year gap. I don’t even intend to suggest to know what HFFF actually did or whether CIA was involved in 1956 Hungary, my point is only that this is neither admission nor meaningful proof of anything other than that they did fund some dissidents outside Hungary in 1963. (They obviously funded dissidents all over the place throughout the decades, I mean, they’d be crazy not to, and 1956 Hungary wouldn’t surprise me either, I suppose.)

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…

What was this group? Do you have any info on when and where it was actually active and what were its intents? Do you know anything about this incorporated (???) organisation aside from its name and that it was supported by CIA in 1963?

the way that CIA funded groups were doing all over the globe at this time

This is not how any historical event can be meaningfully approached. You’re not an oracle, intuitions and insinuations are not proof, please use actual data, show actual connections and explanations of the claims regarding the 1956 revolution.

There was no uprising in Hungary in 1953. There was one in 1956, but it does not seem that this “Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation, Inc.” participated in it (I mean, an “Inc.” in socialist Hungary?). And the letter that this text mentions is all the way from 1963.

Can’t you people read the actual text and check whether this all makes any sense? Can’t you just Google one or two key words?

“Observations by Pliny the Elder”… I love the fact that someone is still reading ancient ass proto-science, but it really really has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Yeah, I’d sooner say the situation is reverse, social studies would move slower and less “definitively” than natural sciences. I’m into linguistics and literature and for me it’s nothing unusual to use scholarship and materials all the way from the 19th century. Of course, when you’re working with old literature or old language, you need old materials too… To me it’s very interesting and important to know what Aristotle thought of Homer, while it’s perfectly irrelevant for a doctor to know what Galen thought of the humours or for a chemist what Newton thought of alchemy.

While I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads, which was widely known to be horrible long before the recent push against these big corpos, I tried BookWyrm (my first contact with the fediverse). I like their approach and wish them success, but what put me off is exactly what you say, the data they use is messy and lacks a lot of info. E.g. one of the things that makes (or at least made) GR satisfying is the visual aspect, you get these cool charts with the book covers, but Open Library doesn’t have covers on so many books. So should I go to Google Images and add covers for 80% of my “library” of like 500 books? Lots of work.

For comparison, TMDb, which is the source of data for Letterboxd, seems to have about as high-quality if not better data than IMDb that it is an alternative to (idk if it’s FOSS though?).

I’ve manually added many dozens books to Goodreads, so I’m not against assisting a site I use and enjoy. (Ofc at this point I regret improving that garbage site.) But the lack of data on BookWyrm was just too much even for me.

So in the end I just switched to the simplest solution: LibreOffice Calc. But we do need an alternative to GR. I came across BookBrainz a few years ago, it was still early in development. Today it might be better, I should give it a shot and maybe add some data there…

he reckoned to add the cities population of 1.5 M to the tally.

That would mean 90% of Belgrade was in the streets that day. As intense the popular support of the protests is, that number is surely a strech. 800k is already quite mind-boggling by the standards of the country… actually, by the standards of any country.

Edit: “The number of protesters present in Belgrade at the protest is disputed: the official government figure provided by MUP was 107,000, an analysis by the Archive of Public Meetings found there were between 275,000 and 325,000 present “with the possibility that the number was even higher,”[499] and Božo Prelević [sr], the former MUP minister, estimated there were at least half a million protesters.[500]” (Wikipedia)

The Reuters number was simply taken from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP), which obviously preferred to keep the number low.

A thread about this is literally pinned on r/europe.

Edit: Also on front page of r/popular with >66k upvotes.

You don’t have to protest at Washington DC.

Since you’re drawing parallels to Serbia - yes, you do want to protest as close to the centre of power as possible, and that’s what Serbs did.

You don’t think the people in Serbia didn’t drive or ride 2-3 hours to get there?

I don’t. The driving distance between Belgrade and Novi Sad, the second largest Serbian city, is ~1 h. And Belgrade by itself already has more than enough population for massive protests, because it has four times the population of Novi Sad and around 1/4 of the population of the entire country. This degree of centralisation and physical proximity is completely incomparable to US. US geography significantly diffuses the power of protests.

Also the Serbian protests have been initiated and are led by students who in general do not drive around much, it’s safe to assume most don’t have their own cars, etc. IIRC, some of those who participated in the yesterday protest were brought by buses to Belgrade, which was organised ahead of time by the protesters.

The estimates for the Belgrade protest go as far as 800k participants.

Serbia has a population of 6.6 million.

I’m not sure if #ebooks mirrors Libgen. I wouldn’t be surprised if they copy from each other.

It is unclear to me what’s the method to upload to #ebooks. I’ve uploaded some obscure books to Libgen in the past, so I checked whether they’re available on #ebooks, and they’re not. So… they don’t mirror each other. I checked both UnderNet and IRCHighway, and the latter even directed me to these websites in case I’m looking for textbooks. It doesn’t seem like an adequate replacement for LG, at least for my purposes.

I have allergies against ads, countdowns, etc. The interweb is polluted with that stuff and so are most piracy sites.

As I’ve said, this is not a big issue with the sites listed on the uptime tracker I linked. Libgen.is and Z-library have neither (the latter has daily download limits per IP), AA has a countdown (not always), and libgen.li has ads (which I had no idea about until I saw other people mentioning it, thanks to uBlock).

If I’ve understood it correctly, this isn’t a lawsuit over the recent discovery of Meta downloading terabytes of books from Libgen?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t #ebooks basically just mirror Libgen?

Among the major book downloading websites, only libgen.li has ads, and only Anna’s Archive has a countdown.

It’s been offline for like a month, maybe more, I haven’t kept track. I don’t know any details, maybe there’s info on their forums, but overall the owners are quite secretive.