121–130 of 131 posts
Assange is a real scumbag for risking people's lives. He claims his real purpose is to protect against threats against democracy. Isn't it interesting how he behaves when he gets a little bit of power - autocratic, capricious, and meglomaniacal? I wonder what sort of behavior that he could rationalize in the name of the greater good.
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Are you really that literal? My one sentence response contains a comma. The "No" is a response to your query. The rest of the sentence does not in any way contradict what I said before.
literal about what? your explanation was poorly phrased, how was i to interpolate what you really meant if you didn't clarify it fully? my parsing of your sentence is valid, as is yours. and i didn't say or intend to imply there was any contradiction. just pointing out that you changed your "he's a scumbag because..." def'n. moving goalposts (no matter how small) in a conversation typically isn't cool. "Assange is a…
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That's a pretty worthless comment if you don't have justification for either of those two points. I see you haven't been here long, though, and your karma seems to be reflecting that you don't really get HN yet, so if you're just trolling you can ignore this comment.
i'm not sure what you mean by "worthless". it's just taking the two terms and going by their def'n. seems fairly obvious. news - wikileaks provides information to the public hacker - ummmmm, i'd have to ask you what your def'n is here. this is just fairly obvious. a lot of their data is acquired through electronic means. p.s. i don't post often (not much time), and i've been here quite a while. my karma is due to one…
My definition certainly doesn't end at "uses electronics."
Today I turned on a light. Should I describe the contents of my room? It was information gathered through electronic means.
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That's a pretty worthless comment if you don't have justification for either of those two points. I see you haven't been here long, though, and your karma seems to be reflecting that you don't really get HN yet, so if you're just trolling you can ignore this comment.
also, from hn guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" so i guess you don't get hn either....
As far as calling names was concerned, I actually suspected that you were just trolling me.
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> The truth, probably, lies somewhere in the middle. Ooh I hate it when people say that :) In particular, it is a hackneyed journalistic technique to list the positions of the Left and the Right, deride them both as extreme, and then settle on a reasonable compromise in the middle. A much better approach is to consider each idea on its merits. In fact the threat to informers was manufactured -- the last drop was uned…
> I would like to hear what you really think. I think this war is unjust and unnecessary. US troops are nowhere near as evil as Nazis were, however, as the Iraqis themselves that commit crimes under US supervision are no match to the German counterparts in my extreme A. Extreme B is evidently false. Trading a dictatorship for an invasion followed by chaos and civil war is not exactly a choice Iraqis would have made.…
Re the 2nd, it turns out it's possible to build schools and hospitals without soldiers.
In Afghanistan, the price of every soldier could build 20 schools. In Iraq the ratio may be lower but, it's still a good swap.
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You can be as bummed as you want. I don't see where you have posted a source for your claim that's more reliable than a Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or one of Glenn Beck's equally unreliable compatriots at Fox News. ONLY thing linked NY Times article and aaronbrethorst claim share is founders name.
I think this story at the NYTimes corroborates what I was saying before: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html
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How would you find out? Information coming out of Afghanistan is sketchy, there are very few journalists on the ground, we don't have lists of every civilian who gets killed.
Well, you'd expect the US Secretary of Defense to have an idea about it, and he says he doesn't know of any civilian killed for appearing in the previous documents ( http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/10/16/wikileaks.assessment/ ).
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also, from hn guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."" so i guess you don't get hn either....
My annoyance may have gotten the better of me, but I stand by my claim that your post essentially boiled down to "nu-uh, it totally does!" Pointing out that you need to make an actual argument to convince people doesn't seem outrageous to me. As far as calling names was concerned, I actually suspected that you were just trolling me.
main point was that wikileaks, for me, provides much more insight/info/"bootstrapping-a-new-source-of-news" than most of the stuff i see on hn. hence, i'd rather keep it's presence on here than have it removed. (again, it might only be me that's interested in such things, but judging from some of the comments, it looks like i'm not alone).
whether you agree or disagree with the tone/perspective of wikileaks, they are a resource of information that is "changing the industry" (or whatever hollow cliche is usually spouted up by VCs/investors). hence by either interpretation of "hacker news" (either strictly an entrepreneurial/start-up resource or something akin to 2600), their activities/approaches can be insightful to some of us.
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literal about what? your explanation was poorly phrased, how was i to interpolate what you really meant if you didn't clarify it fully? my parsing of your sentence is valid, as is yours. and i didn't say or intend to imply there was any contradiction. just pointing out that you changed your "he's a scumbag because..." def'n. moving goalposts (no matter how small) in a conversation typically isn't cool. "Assange is a…
Let's see: false dichotomy - check. Overly argumentative - check. Strawman argument - check. Yup, I'm on the internet...
just trying to have a conversation, not really interested in arguing (usually futile, especially on the web/forums/etc.). if i'm missing something i didn't see/understand, i'm always looking to find the error in my ways (it happens often, hence i've learned to always be eager in engaging conversation, whether on the streetcorners or the webs...).
what were the strawmen or false dichotomies?
i think all my points and questions were valid. i'm not sure if you're being disingenuous and dismissive, or just afraid to concede that your rhetoric is both unconvincing and (probably) wrong, or a combination of the two.