<story><title>CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup</title><url>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msoad</author><text>This is why my friends ask me as an Iranian how the hell I can be happy living in the U.S. I can&amp;#x27;t explain them that U.S. citizens are viction of the same policies. The thing that I don&amp;#x27;t understand is, who are those elite people who make this kind of decisions? Who are they? Who leads the whole thing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>calibraxis</author><text>Aaron Swartz reviewed Chomsky&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Understanding Power&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&amp;#x2F;weblog&amp;#x2F;epiphany&lt;/a&gt;). It&amp;#x27;s the best introduction I know.&lt;p&gt;The system isn&amp;#x27;t a secret; there&amp;#x27;s no conspiracy. Obama really is president; election money has a deciding effect on elections; our &amp;quot;democracy&amp;quot; is top-down (and anyone who takes history&amp;#x2F;politics seriously knows it isn&amp;#x27;t really a democracy, though it has some democratic forms); our economic resources are owned by elites; etc.&lt;p&gt;But just as we don&amp;#x27;t use commercials to help us evaluate the technical specs of some commodity, we shouldn&amp;#x27;t believe utterances of those in power (it&amp;#x27;s no secret they&amp;#x27;re generally written by professionals called &amp;quot;speechwriters&amp;quot;). Instead, we look at their decisions, actions, institutional forces, history, etc. Tends to make things a lot clearer.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;[Edit: also try looking at things from the perspective of an observer from Mars; it&amp;#x27;s oddly helpful.]&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup</title><url>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msoad</author><text>This is why my friends ask me as an Iranian how the hell I can be happy living in the U.S. I can&amp;#x27;t explain them that U.S. citizens are viction of the same policies. The thing that I don&amp;#x27;t understand is, who are those elite people who make this kind of decisions? Who are they? Who leads the whole thing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madaxe</author><text>Nobody. Create any sufficiently complicated system and it&amp;#x27;ll do random crap that nobody expects or desires.&lt;p&gt;The sad truth is that there&amp;#x27;s no &amp;quot;man behind the curtain&amp;quot;, just a gaggle of idiots and processes that make no sense, and the rest is butterflies and hurricanes.&lt;p&gt;This is a far scarier reality than there being some mysterious illuminati-like sect running the show, as it means there is no enemy to fight but our own nature.</text></comment>